>'V- •,--'// ^>-a-.  ■'■(;•  .  /'l^.   \M/,^  It^K^r^J^iL^lIiX^i^U.-J-m^  '-'.Ml: 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 
AT  LOS  ANGELES 


GIFT   OF   CAPT.   AND    MRS. 
PAUL   MCBRIDE  PERIGORD 


,^:i;|pite= 


<   A  )  11:'  uiv!>! 


ANGELES 

jMBKABY 


<3^Vt_ 


3  ^^ 


LIFE    QUESTIONS. 


BY    THE    SAME    AUTHOR. 


CHRISTIANITY  THE  SCIENCE  OF  MANHOOD. 
THE  RELIGION  OF  EVOLUTION.     i2mo.    $1.50. 
LIGHT  ON  THE  CLOUD.     i8mo.     $1-25. 
BLUFFTON  :  a  Story  of  To-day.     wmo.    $1.30. 


i2mo.    $1.50. 


Life  Questions. 


BY 


M.  J.    SAVAGE. 


^•:i'H/'' 


BOSTON: 

Geo  H.  Ellis,  141  Franklin  Strkbt. 

1886. 


14  4677 


Copyright,  1S79, 
By  LOCKWOOD,  BROOKS  &  CO. 


TO 
MY  MOST  MERCILESS  CRITIC— 
MY  MOST  CAREFUL  ADVISER- 
MY  BEST  INSPIRATION— 

MY  WIFE. 


PREFACE. 


Not  of  my  own  motive,  but  at  the  request  of  those 
who  first  heard  them,  these  seven  Sunday  morning 
addresses  are  now  given  to  the  public  in  book  form. 
No  special  claim  is  set  up  on  their  behalf.  They 
are  only  a  piece  cut  off  the  web  of  ordinary  work. 
With  one  exception  they  were  spoken,  not  written  ; 
and  they  are  now  reprinted  from  stenographic 
reports. 

Believing  in  the  truth  of  what  I  try  to  utter,  I 

am  glad  to  reach  as  large  an  audience  as  possible. 

This  is  my  only  apology. 

M.  J.  S. 
Boston,  April,  1879. 


CONTENTS. 


Jfirst  %xtBtxan. 


WHAT   HAVE   I   A   RIGHT   TO   EXPECT  THE   WORLD   TO   DO 

FOR   ME  ? 

PAGE 

TAai  the   World  wrongs  us, i 

Sofne  Effects  of  this  Belief,    .....  4 

The  Conditiofis  of  Life,       ......  6 

How  the  World  looks  on  a  New-comer^         .        .  8 
The  inexorable  Law,    .        .         .         .         .         .         .10 

Illustrations,           .......  11 

Shall  we  blame  the   World  1 15 

The   World  a  Market, 16 

Causes  of  Suffering,    .         .         .         .         .         .         •  17 

The  Question  answered,           .         .         .         .         .  21 

WHAT   IS   THE   RELATION    OF   THE   BODY   TO   THE   MIND  AND 

SOUL? 

What  is  Man  ? 25 

Abstract  Theories,  .......  26 

What  do  we  know  about  it?      .         .         .         .         .28 

The  Power  of  the  Body  over  the  Mind,  .         .         32 

Influence  of  the  Body  on  Morals  and  Religion,  .    35 


Contents. 


The  Duty  of  Physical  Development, 
Practical  Applications, 

Food, 

Sleep,  ..... 

Work,    ...... 

Menial  Inflammation, 


PAGE 

38 

39 
41 
42 

44 


C^irb  #utsti;oti. 


WHAT  IS  GOOD  SOCIETY  AND  HOW  AM  I  RELATED  TO  IT  ? 

Two  Meanings  of  Society, 46 

Ideas  around  which  Society  has  Crystallized,  .         .     47 

What  is  good  Society  1 52 

The  law  of  social  Success,  .         .         *         .         '54 

Give  and  Take,        . 55 

Doers  and  Grumblers,         .         .         .         .         .         '57 

A  Charity  Principle,        ......         58 

Limits  of  Acquaintance,       .         .         .         .         .         •     5^ 

Social  Obligations,  .         .         .         .         .         .         61 

Your  Contribution,      .......     64 

MeJi  and  Women, 65 

Women  and  Men,        .......     68 


Jfourl^  ^u^slion. 


HOW  MUCH  MUST  I  WORK,  AND  HOW  MUCH  MAY  I 

PLAY  } 

Working  and  Playing, 7^^ 

Man's  Nature, 7^ 

Labor  and  Growth, 74 


Contents. 


XI 


Work  and  Civilization, 

•     75 

Work  and  Duty,      .... 

.         .         .         76 

JIow  ?nuch  Labor  ?     .         ,         ,         » 

.         .         .     78 

Play  in  Nature,       .... 

80 

Play  in  Man, 

.     81 

Play  and  Puritafiism,      .         .         . 

82 

The  underlying  Principle,     .         .         . 

.         .         .     85 

How  much  Play  ?   .         .         .         . 

86 

Work  as  Dissipation, 

.        .        .    87 

Perversions, 

.        .        .        89 

Excess, 

.    91 

ixli\  #W£sti;on. 


WHAT    IS    THE     TRUE     PLACE     OF     INTELLECTUAL 


CULTURE 


? 


What  is  Life? 

•                 •                 • 

94 

Life  a  Problem, 

.     96 

Engine  and  Compass, 

97 

Meaning  of  Culture,    . 

.     99 

Bread-winning  Problem, 

lOI 

Moral  Problems, 

.  102 

Religious  Problems, 

.       103 

Social  Problems, 

.   105 

Political  Problems, 

106 

Lntelligence  settles  them. 

.         .   107 

Books  atid  Alemory, 

.       107 

Are  Books  practical! 

.   109 

What  to  read,          .         . 

.         .       no 

xn 


Contents, 


Idealizing  the  Real, 
Time  to  read, 
Mental  Atmosphere,     . 
The  Society  of  Books, 
Books  broaden  Men, 
Books  as  Recreation,    . 


PAGB 
III 


112 
.    114 

117 
.    118 


SHALL    I    TRY   TO   BE   RICH? 


Youth  and  Dreams,         ..... 

.       119 

An  earthly  Paradise,           -         .         ,         .         . 

.  120 

The  Dream  of  Home, 

121 

The  Dream  of  Position, 

.   122 

The  Political  Dream,        ..... 

.       123 

The  Dream  of  Travel,         .         .         .         .         . 

.  124 

Gold  "  the  Stuff  that  Dreams  are  made  of," 

.       125 

Wealth  a  good  Thing, 

.  126 

Evils  of  Poverty, 

.       127 

Wealth  sometimes  too  dear,           .         .         .         . 

.  127 

JEnd  higher  than  Means,           ...         * 

.       128 

Honesty  better  than  Money,          .         .         .         . 

.  129 

Home  better  than  Money,          .... 

.       131 

Culture  better  than  Money,           .         •         •         . 

.  132 

A  Man,  or  three  Dollars,         .... 

.         T^ZZ 

Doing  Good  as  you  go,        ,         ,        »        ,        , 

'  135 

Get  Money,  but  — ,           ..... 

.       135 

Rank  of  Money-makers, 

.  136 

Contents. 


xui 


HOW   HIGH   IS   THE  RANK   OF  LOVE? 


PAGE 

AH  saved  if  Love  not  lost, 

.            138 

The  World-voyage,      .         .         .         . 

•     139 

All  for  Love,           .... 

140 

The  Bird' s  Nest,          .         .         .         . 

.     141 

Love  in  Literature, 

.            143 

Love  in  Life,        .         .         .         .         . 

•     147 

Sentiment  and  Setititnentality, 

.            147 

Lligh  Water  Mark  of  a  World, 

.     149 

Love  and  Patriotism, 

.            151 

Love  and  Morals,        .         .         .         . 

•   153 

Love  and  Religion,   .... 

.       154 

Love  and  Law,    .         .         .         .         . 

•  155 

Love  and  Retrospect, 

.       156 

Love  and  Prospect,       .         .         .         . 

•  157 

LIFE    QUESTIONS. 


Jfirst  ^u^stion. 

WHAT    HAVE    I    A    RIGHT    TO    EXPECT    THE    WORLD    TO 

DO    FOR    ME? 


That  the   World  wrongs  us, 


'£>' 


In  Music  Hall  not  long  ago,  speaking  of  the 
world  and  of  the  difficulties  which  men  and  women 
meet  in  trying  to  get  through  it  creditably  or  suc- 
cessfully, a  prominent  lecturer  said,  in  his  half 
humorous  way,  "  This  is  not  a  very  good  world  for 
men  and  women,  anyhow.  Three-quarters  of  it  are 
water,  and  it  is  a  good  deal  better  place  for  the 
development  of  fishes  than  it  is  for  men."  This 
simply  voices,  in  a  certain  way,  a  sentiment  very 
often  expressed,  and  that  has  been  expressed  from 
the  beginning  even  until  to-day,  and  that  the  world 
has  by  no  means  heard  the  last  of  yet.  I  wish  to 
read  to  you,  as  illustrating  another  phase  of  it,  two 
or  three  lines  from  Ralph  Waldo  Emerson's  poem : 


LJFE  QUESTIONS. 


Good-by,  proud  world  !  I  'm  going  home. 

Thoit  art  not  my  friend,  and  I  'm  not  thine. 
Long  through  thy  weary  crowds  I  roam  — 

A  river-ark  on  tlie  ocean  brine. 
Long  I  've  been  tossed  like  the  driven  foam ; 
But  now,  proud  world,  I  'm  going  home. 

Good-by  to  Flattery's  fawning  face ; 

To  Grandeur,  with  his  wise  grimace ; 

To  upstart  Wealth's  averted  eye  ; 

To  supple  oiilice,  low  and  high ; 

To  crowded  halls,  to  court  and  street; 

To  frozen  hearts  and  hasting  feet ; 

To  those  who  go,  and  those  who  come ; 

Good-by,  proud  world  !  I  'm  going  home. 

Thus  Mr.  Emerson  refers  not  to  going  home  in  the 
sense  of  leaving  the  world,  as  I  take  it  from  the  rest 
of  the  poem,  but  to  deserting  the  busy  life  of  men 
and  going  to  his  home  in  the  country,  retiring  to  him- 
self, to  his  more  private  life.  This  general  complaint 
against  the  world,  as  though  in  some  sort  of  fashion 
it  owed  us  what  it  does  not  render,  is  the  point  I  have 
in  mind,  and  which  I  wish  to  force  on  your  attention. 
You  can  trace  this  same  thought  away  back  to  the 
very  dawn  of  the  world.  It  is  this  which  gave  its 
inspiration  and  which  gives  its  permanent  life  and 
interest  to  the  book  of  Job  —  this  question  as  to  why 
the  world  should  treat  a  man  as  Job  was  treated. 
And  as  you  come  down  the  ages  you  find  it  the  theme 
of  poet  and  orator  and  of  common  conversation  in 
every-day  life.     This  was  the  central  purpose  and 


THE    WORLD. 


point  of  the  great  epic  of  Milton.  His  purpose,  he 
said,  was  to  "reconcile  the  ways  of  God  to  man." 
That  is,  to  explain  the  justice  of  the  way  in  which 
the  world  treats  people.  That  is  what  it  means,  I 
take  it,  when  translated  into  common  speech.  And 
all  of  us,  I  suppose,  as  we  grow  older,  have  more  or 
less  of  this  feeling  of  being  out  with  the  world,  of 
being  dissatisfied  with  it ;  of  feeling  that  somehow  or 
other  it  has  fallen  short  of  our  just  expectation  ;  that 
it  has  not  given  us  all  that  we  deserve ;  that  it  has 
not  paid  us  all  it  owes ;  that  it  has  not  furnished  the 
amount  of  peace,  or  pleasure,  or  power,  that  some- 
how or  other  we  are  entitled  to.  The  young  man,  as 
he  gets  along  in  life,  begins  to  lose  the  glow  and 
beauty  and  force  of  the  ideal  that  inspired  him.  As 
Mr.  Julian  Hawthorn  has  lately  sung  it  in  a  beautiful 
poem  in  the  London  Spectator: 

Fails  boyhood's  hope  ere  long, 
For  the  deed  still  mocks  the  plan. 

Men  and  women  all  about  us  feel  that  somehow 
the  world  has  wronged  them.  They,  perhaps,  are 
ugly,  when  they  wish  they  might  have  been  beautiful. 
Somehow  they  are  out  with  the  world  because  they 
are  not  finer-looking  or  more  attractive.  Here  is  a 
man  who  thinks  he  can  write  a  poem,  and  the  world 
does  not  agree  with  him  ;  and  he  is  out  with  the 
world  because  its  judgment  does  not  coincide  with 


LIFE  QUESTIONS. 


his  own.  Here  is  a  man  who  thinks  he  ought  to  be 
richer  than  he  is  to-day  for  all  the  effort  he  has  put 
forth ;  that  he  ought  to  be  able  to  own  a  finer  house 
and  live  on  a  better  street;  but  the  world  has  not 
given  him  the  power  to  carry  out  his  wishes,  and  so 
he  is  dissatisfied,  disgruntled,  as  we  say,  with  the 
world.  Here  is  another  man  who  thinks  that  he 
ought  to  occupy  a  higher  social  position  than  his 
fellow-men,  neighbors  and  friends  concede  to  him, 
and  he  feels  that  somehow  the  world  has  wronged 
him.  There  is  another  man  who  feels  that  after  all 
the  service  he  has  rendered  his  party  or  his  country 
he  deserves  an  office  that  somebody  else  gets,  and 
that  he  must  go  without,  and  he  feels  that  the  world 
has  wronged  him.  And  so  in  every  direction  —  you 
will  fill  up  the  picture  for  yourselves  —  men  feel  that 
the  world  ought  to  have  done  something  for  them  that 
it  has  not  done ;  that  they  ought  to  have  gotten  out 
of  the  world  something  they  have  failed  to  obtain. 

Some  Effects  of  this  Belief. 

The  results  of  this  are  sometimes  exceedingly 
disastrous  and  unfortunate.  We  find  one  man, 
such  as  I  alluded  to  a  moment  ago,  who  simply  loses 
the  power  of  his  ideal ;  who  started  out  full  of 
hope,  courage,  cheer,  believing  that  the  world  had 
grand  things  for   him,  and   that   he   might   achieve 


THE  WORLD. 


5 


great  results  ;  but  at  last  he  sits  down,  discouraged, 
disheartened,  content  to  crawl  through  the  world 
any  way  he  can.  Another  man  by  this  process  is  not 
simply  discouraged  ;  he  is  soured,  embittered,  turned 
into  an  enemy  and  fault-finder  against  the  world, 
continually  fretting,  day  after  day,  at  its  inhabitants 
and  its  woes.  Another  still,  in  some  countries,  is 
turned  into  a  bandit,  a  robber.  He  says :  "  The 
world  is  not  my  friend,  and  I  am  not  its  friend.  I 
will  get  out  of  it  everything  I  can."  In  other 
countries,  where  banditti  are  not  very  popular  or  very 
safe,  a  man  may  turn  precisely  the  same  force  of 
disgust  with  the  world  into  a  selfish  seeking  for 
gain.  In  business,  or  in  social  life,  without  any 
regard  to  the  rights  or  interests  of  others,  he 
makes  himself  a  selfish  man,  fighting  the  world  as 
though  it  were  his  enemy,  and  determined  to  get  out 
of  it,  its  confusion,  its  necessities,  all  that  he  can,  and 
let  it  go  its  own  way,  as  it  will.  Another  man  is 
turned  into  a  misanthrope,  like  Byron,  who  vents  his 
spleen  through  beautiful  verses  or  some  other  me- 
dium ;  holding  himself  up  before  the  world  in  the 
role  of  a  martyr,  asking  men's  pity  and  compassion, 
that  a  man  so  wonderfully  endowed,  so  beautiful,  so 
fine,  so  nobly  furnished  as  he,  should  not  be  any 
better  appreciated.  Another,  perhaps,  carries  this 
disgust  so  far  as  to  reach  the  brink  of  suicide  itself, 
from  which  he  plunges  into  the  abyss  ;    so  tired  of 


LIFE    QUESTIONS. 


life,  so  disgusted  with  the  society  of  the  world  that  he 
leaves  it  and  will  have  no  more  to  do  with  it.  These 
represent  the  different  phases  of  the  attitude  of  mind 
into  which  men  are  apt  to  come,  growing  out  of  this 
demand  which  they  make  upon  the  world,  but  which 
the  world  does  not  satisfy. 

T/ie  Co7iditions  of  Life. 

I  propose,  then,  to  raise  and  answer  this  ques- 
tion if  I  can  :  How  much  have  I  a  right  to  claim 
of  the  world,  to  demand  that  it  shall  do  for  me  .■* 
Let  us  look  at  the  conditions  a  moment.  Stand 
by  the  cradle  of  a  new-born  child.  The  child  is 
what  it  is  by  virtue  of  what  .-*  Not  by  virtue  of 
that  which  any  man,  woman  or  child  on  the  face 
of  the  earth  has  done,  except  its  immediate  parents 
and  friends  and  the  long  line  of  its  ancestry.  The 
child  may  be  beautiful,  so  fair  that  as  it  grows 
up  it  shall  become  a  queen  in  society  and  find  the 
world  in  admiration  at  her  feet.  The  child  may  be 
so  plain  that  it  shall  never  win  an  admirer  and  go 
through  the  world  sad  and  alone.  The  child  may 
have  a  brain  power  that  shall  fit  him  to  be  a  king  of 
men,  a  political  leader,  an  orator,  a  poet,  a  master 
mind  in  the  business  concerns  of  the  world,  or  it 
may  be,  so  enfeebled  in  brain  and  mental  activity 
and  power  that  it  shall   hardly  be  able  to  gain  for 


THE    WORLD. 


itself  standing  room  in  the  great  crowded  market  of 
the  world  ;  pressed  by  others  into  a  corner,  fed  on  the 
crusts  and  crumbs  that  are  the  leavings  of  the  world's 
rich  tables,  or  peremptorily  thrust  out  into  the  dark- 
ness from  which  it  came.     It  may  be  a  poet  or  it  may 
be  an  idiot.     It  starts  with  certain  qualities,  certain 
faculties,  certain  endowments  it  has  received,  I  say, 
from  the  long  line  of  its  ancestry  reaching  back  no 
one  knows  how  far  into  the  darkness  and  infinity  of 
its  past.     Now  who  is  to  blame  for  the  faculties  and 
powers  with  which  this  child  enters  upon  life  ?     You 
may  blame    God  if   you  will,  though   you   have    no 
recourse.     There   is    no  higher   court  of   appeal    to 
which  we  can  carry  a  case  like  this.     You  may  say  it 
is  not  right ;  but,  if  you  will  think  for  a  moment,  the 
only  practical  definition  of  right  that  we  can  frame 
includes  the  idea  that  there  is  some  person  who  is 
responsible  and  to  whom  we  can  appeal   to   make 
good  our  claim.     There  is  no  right  or  wrong  in  the 
matter  so  far  as   such  a  definition  as  that  is  con- 
cerned.    We  stand  helpless  before  a  fact.     We  may 
blame  the  parents  or  the  ancestors ;  it  may  be  a  fault 
or  a  folly,  a  sin  or  a  misfortune  of  one  or  many  of 
this  long  line  of  ancestry  that  is  responsible  for  the 
condition  of  the  child  when  it  starts  its  life  course. 
But  at  any  rate  we  cannot  help  it  now.     The  child  is 
here  and  is  what  it  is.     The  point  I  wish  to  impress 
upon  you  lies  in  this  question  :  Is  the  world  to  blame 


8  LIFE   QUESTIONS. 

for  it  ?  What  do  we  mean  by  the  world  in  a  question 
like  that  ?  We  do  not  mean  the  general  system  of 
the  universe,  or  the  soil,  the  climate,  the  sun,  the 
stars,  the  influences  of  wind  and  rain.  We  talk 
about  being  out  with  the  world  and  the  world  not 
rendering  us  its  due  ;  what  we  practically  mean  is  the 
men  and  women  that  make  up  the  inhabitants  of  the 
world  at  the  present  time  —  the  time  of  which  we  are 
speaking.  Now  are  these  men  and  women  to  blame  .-* 
Are  they  to  be  praised  because  this  new-born  child  is 
a  genius  ;  are  they  to  be  blamed  because  it  is  in- 
capable.-* The  world  has  nothing  whatever  to  do 
with  it.  Lodge  our  fault-finding  where  we  will  we 
have  no  right  to  say  the  world  is  at  fault.  The 
world  has  had  nothing  to  do  with  it. 

How  the    World  looks  upon  a  New  Comer. 

How  then  shall  the  world  look  upon  this  new-born 
child  that  is  just  entering  upon  its  stage .-'  The  world 
is  pretty  full.  All  the  offices  are  filled  and  there  are 
ten  thousand  applicants  for  every  vacancy;  all  the 
high  positions  of  responsibility  and  trust  are  filled, 
and  there  are  thousands  of  people  waiting  for  one 
here  and  one  there  to  fall  out  and  give  them  a  place 
in  the  higher  rank.  The  world's  land  is  very  largely 
occupied ;  it  is  all  owned  and  there  are  thousands  of 
people  who  would  like  to  own  land  for  whom  there  is 


THE  WORLD. 


no  land  to  own.  All  the  world  is  in  the  possession  of 
people  before  this  child  arrives.  Does  the  coming, 
then,  of  this  child  confer  any  benefit  upon  the  world 
so  that  it  stands  in  the  relation  of  obligation  towards 
the  child .-'  It  seems  to  me  rather  that  it  is  some- 
thing like  a  party  at  a  feast;  when  a  new  comer 
arrives  it  is  only  another  chair,  another  mouth  to  fill, 
a  subdivision  of  the  supplies ;  and  if  the  company 
fills  the  table  and  they  are  agreeably  related  to  each 
other  we  cannot  feel  that  they  are  under  any  special 
obligation  to  the  new  comer.  Here,  then,  it  seems 
to  me  is  the  attitude  in  which  we  ought  to  stand 
toward  this  question.  The  new  comer  arrives  in  the 
world  filled  with  men  and  women  occupying  all  the 
places,  enjoying  so  far  as  they  can  all  the  good  and 
sweets  and  amusements  of  life,  and  doing  so  far  as 
they  can  all  the  work.  Now,  then,  by  what  process 
—  here  is  the  question  —  by  what  process  shall  the 
new  comer  establish  a  claim  to  the  good  things  of 
the  world }  By  what  right  shall  he  say  I  ought  to 
have  some  of  this  money,  I  ought  to  have  some  of 
this  land,  I  ought  to  have  one  of  these  offices,  I  ought 
to  fill  one  of  these  high  social  positions,  men  oughb- 
to  bow  down  to  my  genius  and  recognize  my  right 
and  my  power.''  Through  what  process,  I  say,  shall 
the  new  comer  in  the  world  establish  his  claim  to  any 
such  recognition  as  this  .-*  The  principle  is  embod- 
ied, it  seems  to  me,  perfectly  and  crisply  in  those  old 


10  LIFE    QUESTIONS. 

words  of  Paul.  The  only  way  by  which  a  child  can 
establish  his  claim  for  bread  is  by  the  process  of 
labor.  "  If  any  man  will  not  work  neither  shall  he 
eat."  Of  course  from  the  inexorable  working  of  this 
law  I  have  mentally  excepted  the  obligation  which  the 
father  and  mother  owe  to  the  child.  They,  who  have 
been  responsible  for  bringing  the  child  into  the  world, 
owe  to  it  everything  which  they  possess  and  which 
they  can  possibly  do  in  developing  the  child  and 
fitting  it  for  the  part  it  is  to  play  in  the  world ;  but 
outside  of  father  and  mother,  outside  of  this  intimate 
home  circle,  where  comes  in  the  obligation.''  And 
here  it  seems  to  me  we  must  face 

T/ie  Inexorable  Law  — 

"  If  any  man  will  not  work  neither  shall  he  eat." 
The  principle  runs  through  and  underlies  the  whole 
question  that  I  have  raised.  Let  us  look  at  it  in  two 
or  three  particulars.  I  think,  perhaps,  that  I  could 
write  a  poem,  and  I  think  the  world  ought  to  render 
me  recognition  as  a  poet.  What  can  I  do  about  it } 
I  must  write  a  poem  which  the  world  shall  recognize 
as  poetry,  and  for  which  it  shall  be  willing  to  pay, 
else  my  claim  is  null  and  void  —  mere  empty  words. 
I  may  be  ever  so  sure  that  the  poem  I  have  written 
is  a  masterpiece,  and  that  it  will  give  me  fame  and 
the  gratitude  of  men ;  but  if  the  world  does  not  agree 


THE   WOBLD.  n 


with  me,  that  is,  if  I  have  not  been  able  to  do 
something  for  which  the  world  is  willing  to  pay, 
then  I  have  not  the  slightest  claim  for  anything  in 
the  shape  of  fame  or  money  for  the  poem  that  I 
have  written.  Here  is  a  principle  which  underlies  a 
great  deal  of  the  discontent  of  the  world,  much  of  the 
present  labor  question,  and  the  communistic  discus- 
sion, if  you  will  take  the  trouble  to  apply  it  for  your- 
selves. Before  I  can  establish  any  claim  for  reward 
I  must  do  something,  not  that  is  simply  work,  I  must 
do  something  that  the  world  wants  done.  Not  every 
man  that  works  shall  eat.  He  must  do  something 
that  the  world  wants  done  and  is  willing  to  pay  for, 
before  he  has  any  right  to  demand  bread  at  the 
world's  hands. 

Illustrations. 

Suppose  that  I  go  out  into  an  unoccupied  field  and 
work  by  the  day,  by  the  week,  by  the  month,  by  the 
year,  in  building  stone  wall,  laboring  ten  or  twelve 
hours  a  day  as  hard  as  I  know  how.  But  I  am  build- 
ing a  stone  wall  where  nobody  wants  a  stone  wall, 
where  it  does  not  answer  any  purpose  of  keeping 
anything  in  or  of  keeping  anything  out ;  nobody 
wants  a  wall  there,  nobody  is  willing  to  pay  for  its 
being  put  there ;  consequently  I  have  not  the  slight- 
est claim  on  anybody  to  pay  me  for  the  labor  that  I 
have  gratuitously  performed.    The  law  is  that  I  must 


12  LIFE   QUESTIONS. 

do  something  that  the  world  wants  done,  and  then  I 
may  ask  the  world  to  pay  me  for  it. 

Suppose  I  think  I  am  an  orator.  Unless  I  can 
convince  enough  people  to  give  me  an  audience  that 
such  is  the  fact,  I  have  no  right  to  claim  any  reputa- 
tion as  an  orator  nor  any  reward  from  the  world. 
Suppose  I  think  I  am  a  genius  in  any  direction.  If  I 
cherish  that  opinion  all  to  myself  and  can  find  nobody 
to  agree  with  me,  I  may  think  that  the  world's  judg- 
ment is  poor  ;  I  may  believe  that  posterity  will  accord 
me  that  which  the  world  refuses  now ;  but  I  have  no 
recourse  and  I  have  no  right  to  find  fault  with  the 
world  constituted  as  it  is.  Take  for  example  two  or 
three  great  illustrations,  that  you  may  bring  before  you 
more  forcibly  just  what  I  mean.  Madame  Gerster 
has  been  singing  to  crowded  audiences,  delighting 
Boston  and  the  great  cities  of  the  country,  within  the 
last  few  weeks.  She  was  born  of  humble  parentage, 
but  she  inherited  —  without  any  merit  on  her  part  — 
she  inherited  a  miracle  of  a  voice ;  and  the  world 
that  loves  to  be  sung  to  as  marvellously  as  she  can 
sing,  is  ready  to  go  in  crowds  and  fling  bouquets 
and  pour  out  money  at  her  feet.  Now  is  anybody 
to  be  praised  or  is  anybody  to  be  blamed  for  this  ? 
Certainly  it  is  no  merit  of  hers  that  she  was 
endowed  by  nature  with  this  wondrous  quality. 
Certainly  it  is  no  fault  of  the  world  that  it  prefers 
the  singing  of  a  nightingale  to  the  cawing  of  a  crow. 


THE  WORLD. 


13 


The  crow  may  blame  any  one  he  pleases  for  not 
having  a  better  voice,  but  he  cannot  blame  people  for 
not  liking  his  voice  unless  it  is  better.  So  if  another 
person  thinks  he  can  sing,  but  cannot  convince  the 
world,  in  any  large  numbers,  that  his  conviction  is  a 
fact,  he  has  no  fault  to  find,  it  seems  to  me,  with  the 
world.  Even  when  the  individual  is  right  and  the 
world  is  wrong,  what  shall  we  say  then  .-'  Take  a 
case  like  Milton.  Milton  wrote  one  of  the  grandest 
epics  of  the  world,  and  received  as  pay  for  it  not  the 
wages  of  a  hod  carrier  or  a  common  carpenter, 
counted  in  money.  It  received  very  few  readers  and 
very  few  admirers  in  his  own  life  time ;  but  he  was 
conscious  in  his  own  mind  that  he  had  written  a  work 
that  the  world  would  not  willingly  let  die.  Was  the 
world  to  blame  .''  I  think  not.  The  men  and  the  women 
that  made  up  the  city  of  London  at  the  time  Milton 
wrote  were  not  to  blame  for  their  lack  of  culture  or 
poetic  taste.  Just  as  Milton  had  inherited  his  mag- 
nificent brain,  so  they  had  inherited  brains  that  were 
unable  to  perceive  its  magnificence.  It  seems  to  me 
they  are  no  more  to  be  blamed  than  blind  people  are 
for  not  admiring  pictures,  or  deaf  people  for  not 
loving  music.  They  received  what  they  could,  and 
they  praised  and  petted  inferior  poets,  while  they 
neglected  him.  But  they  praised  and  petted  the  best 
they  could  think  and  appreciate.  And  Milton,  did  he 
lose  his  reward .''     Would  Milton  have  been  willing. 


14  LIFE  QUESTIONS. 


could  he  have  foreseen  the  future,  to  have  taken  large 
money  payment  from  the  crowds  of  London  at  his 
time,  and  have  lowered  his  genius  down  to  their  level 
so  that  they  could  appreciate  it  and  would  be  willing 
to  pay  ?  Would  he  have  been  willing  to  have  taken 
that  and  been  forgotten,  or  would  he  rather  prefer 
the  consciousness  of  the  magnificence  of  his  genius 
and  look  for  the  recognition  of  higher  and  nobler 
times  ? 

Another  striking  illustration.  I  have  received  a 
paper  this  week,  speaking  of  the  wonderful  amount 
of  money  which  Madame  Anderson  has  received 
recently  in  New  York,  for  the  marvellous  feat  of 
walking  which  she  has  performed.  She  walked 
twenty-seven  hundred  quarter  miles  in  twenty-seven 
hundred  quarter  hours,  all  inside  of  a  few  days,  and 
she  has  received  for  it  fifteen  thousand  dollars.  A 
mother,  faithful  in  the  performance  of  her  duty  and 
the  care  of  her  children,  laboring  night  and  day, 
watching  anxiously  and  carefully  over  her  babe, 
spends  weeks  and  months  and  years,  and  never  sees 
at  once  perhaps  one  hundred  dollars.  This  higher 
quality  of  faithful,  noble,  self-sacrificing  motherhood 
the  world  does  not  pay  by  its  thousands  of  dollars,  as 
it  does  one  that  can  perform  some  wonderful  physical 
feat  like  this.  Here  is  another  woman  who  has  a 
literary  genius  and  success.  She  writes  and  the 
world  appreciates  and  admires,  but  she  gets  no  such 


THE   WORLD. 


15 


pay  for  her  brains  as  Madame  Anderson  received  for 
her  muscle.  Ralph  Waldo  Emerson,  the  one  man, 
the  one  American,  that  Mr.  Whittier  says  will  be  sure 
to  be  remembered  for  a  thousand  years,  for  all  his 
writings,  all  the  magnificent  wealth  of  his  poetry  and 
genius,  has  never  received  from  his  publishers  so 
much  as  Madame  Anderson  made  in  a  few  days 
walking. 

Shall  we  blame  the    World  f 

Here  is  the  point  —  what  shall  we  say  .-'  Has  the 
world  wronged  Emerson }  I  think  not.  It  seems  to 
me  we  must  answer  again  just  as  we  did  before. 
There  is  not  a  child  in  Boston  that  would  not  pay 
more  to  see  Punch  and  Judy  than  it  would  to  see 
Hamlet.  Shall  we  find  any  fault  with  the  child  }  We 
may,  if  we  choose,  find  fault  with  the  constitution  of 
the  universe  that  determines  that  the  progress  of  life 
shall  be  by  development  from  the  simplest  things 
up  through  childhood  to  appreciative,  large-hearted, 
large-brained,  manhood  and  womanhood.  We  may 
if  we  will,  find  fault  with  the  constitution  of  the  uni- 
verse that  determines  that  the  progress  of  men  on 
earth  shall  be  from  the  smallest  and  lowest  beginnings, 
up  through  the  childhood  of  the  race,  and  only  after 
long  ages  attain  the  magnificence  of  heart  and  brain 
that  is  able  to  appreciate  the  highest  and  grandest 
things.     But  so  long  as  the  world  is  in  its  childhood 


1 6  LIFE  QUESTIONS. 

Stage,  so  long  as  the  great  masses  of  men  are  in  their 
childhood  stage,  we  must  expect  them  to  be  happy 
with  childish  things.  But  Emerson  is  not  wronged. 
He  has  his  reward.  He  i-s  receiving  it  and  will 
receive  it  in  the  ages  that  are  to  come.  Would  he 
exchange  those  wonderful  poems,  those  marvellous 
essays,  that  seer-like  insight,  that  genius  of  poetic  and 
powerful  expression,  the  place  that  he  holds  of  love, 
of  worship,  in  thousands  of  hearts  that  are  capable  of 
appreciating  him  —  would  he  exchange  that  for  Mad- 
ame Anderson's  muscle  and  fifteen  thousand  dollars .-' 
Even  Emerson  is  not  wronged.  Though  his  pay 
be  small  in  cash  ;  i-n  love  and  reverence  and  genius 
and  power  and  magic  mastery  of  the  hearts  and  lives 
of  his  fellow-men,  he  has  received  a  thousand-fold, 
and  will  in  the  ages  that  are  to  come. 


"^t)^ 


T/ie    World  a  Market. 

Remember,  then,  that  this  is  the  law.  Here  is  the 
world  —  a  great  market.  Go  into  the  world  and  buy 
what  you  will,  but  remember  you  have  no  claim  on 
anything  unless  you  can  pay  something  that  the 
world  wants.  If  you  choose  to  amuse  the  world,  to 
appeal  to  the  lower  passions  and  tastes  of  the  world, 
then,  since  the  majority  of  men  are  only  partially 
developed,  you  will  gain  a  larger  admiration  at  the 
present  time  ;  you  will  gain  more  money,  but  you  will 


THE   WORLD. 


17 


be  forgotten  when  the  world  has  outgrown  you.  If 
you  want  to  render  the  world  a  service  in  the  higher 
ranges  of  heart  and  intellect,  then  serve  the  world  — 
those  that  can  appreciate  you  —  and  bide  your  time. 
Choose,  and  take  the  consequences  of  your  choice. 
I  would  carry  it  so  far,  even,  as  to  say  that  the 
world's  martyrs  have  no  right  to  find  fault  with  the 
world.  The  world  did  not  appreciate,  it  cast  out 
and  crucified  Jesus  Christ.  Was  the  world  to  blame  ? 
Only  in  the  sense  that  an  ignorant  man  is  to  blame 
because  he  does  not  appreciate  a  high  work  of 
genius ;  only  in  the  sense  that  the  child  is  to  blame 
because  he  is  not  a  man.  Jerusalem  worshipped 
that  which  it  thought  was  righteous.  It  bowed  down 
before  that  which  it  thought  was  sacred  and  true  and 
holy ;  and  it  cast  out  Jesus  with  just  as  much  consci- 
entious sincerity  as  we,  to-day,  frown  upon  and  cast 
out  those  that  we  cannot  appreciate  or  believe  in.  In 
some  cases  the  world  is  wrong,  in  others  it  is  right ; 
and  the  martyr  takes  his  pay  in  the  consciousness  of 
his  high  choice,  and  in  the  admiration  of  the  world 
when  it  has  grown  to  be  large  and  grand  enough  to 
admire. 

Causes  of  Suffering. 

Passing,  then,  rapidly  over  this  principle,  now  let 
us  raise  the  question  as  to  who  is  to  blame  if  the 
world    is    not.     If    we   have   no    right  to  find  fault 
2 


1 8  LIFE   QUESTIONS. 


with  the  world  because  it  does  not  give  us  what  we 
think  it  ought  to  pay,  who  is  to  blame  ?  And  here  I 
wish  to  bring  out  an  idea  large  enough  and  far- 
reaching  enough  in  its  sweep  and  consequences  to 
make  not  a  sermon  but  a  book  in  itself.  I  wish  to 
bring  out  the  idea  that  a  large  part  of  the  evils  under 
which  we  suffer,  and  for  which,  in  a  general  way,  we 
blame  the  world  and  get  out  with  it,  are  things  that 
we  ourselves  are  responsible  for,  that  we  can  either 
prevent  or  cure ;  not  always,  not  completely,  but  so 
largely  that  if  we  would  devote  our  heart  and  our 
strength  to  it  we  could  renovate  life.  Look  for  a 
moment,  and  let  me  run  through  a  few  of  the  things 
and  evils  that  we  suffer  under,  those  that  cause 
the  greatest  amount  of  pain,  and  discomfort,  and 
trial,  —  what  are  they  ? 

First  on  the  list  stands  ill-health.  Half  the  world's 
sorrows,  half  its  troubles,  half  its  discomforts  at 
least,  half  its  discouragements,  half  its  melancholy, 
half  its  blues  that  color  and  darken  the  world,  come 
simply  from  that  one  thing,  ill-health.  Who  is  to 
blame  for  that .''  In  some  cases  we  are  not.  We 
have  inherited  a  tendency  toward  disease.  But  nine 
times  out  of  ten  —  I  say  it  in  case  of  my  own 
sickness,  including  myself  just  as  much-  as  anybody 
else  —  we  ourselves  are  to  blame.  In  a  general  way, 
I  believe  it  is  among  the  duties  of  men  and  women  to 
be  well.    I  think  that  in  nine  cases  out  of  ten  men  and 


THE    WORLD. 


19 


women  might  fairly  be  called  on  to  show  cause  why 
they  are  sick.  I  have  not  been  sick  in  any  serious 
fashion  but  once  for  several  years,  and  then  nobody 
in  the  wide  world  was  to  blame  for  it  but  myself. 
We  eat,  and  drink,  and  dress,  and  expose  ourselves ; 
are  thoughtless  and  careless  in  every  direction,  and 
so  most  of  th-e  sickness  under  which  we  suffer  is 
purely  and  simply  our  own  fault  ;  not  the  fault  of  the 
world  or  the  fault  of  our  neighbors  —  evils  that  are 
curable  or  preventable. 

What  is  the  next  great  cause  of  suffering,  of  the 
pains,  the  discomforts  we  bear.''  It  seems  to  me  it 
lies  just  here.  Not  that  we  have  not  enough  to  make 
us  happy,  enough  to  make  us  comfortable,  but  that 
while  having  all  the  things,  the  raw  material  of 
comfort  and  well-being  about  us,  we  persistently 
fasten  our  attention  on  something  we  have  not, 
and  determine  to  make  ourselves  miserable  on  that 
account.  There  is  hardly  one  of  you  all  that  has  not 
the  materials  for  a  comfortable  and  happy  life.  We 
are  like  the  children  that  we  watch  and  reprove  for 
their  peculiarities.  I  see  my  own  children  playing 
on  the  floor  in  a  perfect  wilderness  of  books  and  toys, 
miserable,  unhappy  and  discontented  because  they 
do  not  possess  something  they  would  be  tired  of  in 
five  minutes  if  they  had  it,  just  as  they  are  of  the 
things  they  have;  or  because  some  other  boy  or 
some  other  little  girl  that  they  know  has  something 


20  LIFE    QUESTIONS. 

they  have  not.  How  large  a  part  of  the  discomforts, 
the  sorrows,  the  sufferings  that  trouble  you,  grow 
out  of  precisely  such  a  root  as  that.  You  are  living, 
perhaps,  on  such  a  street,  having  everything  that 
heart  can  wish,  but  miserable  because  you  have  not 
the  finest  house  on  a  more  fashionable  avenue. 
Because  you  have  not  something  that  somebody  else 
has,  you  are  discontented  and  unhappy.  Purely 
needless,  you  have  no  right  to  find  fault  with  either 
God  or  man  for  sufferings  and  discomforts  like  these. 

And  then  there  is  another  grand  source  of  suffering 
and  sorrow  for  which  we  are  disposed  to  blame  the 
general  system  of  things,  the  universe,  or  God,  or 
man,  or  somebody  else,  when  nobody  is  responsible 
for  it  but  ourselves ;  and  that  is  this  persistent  fore- 
boding of  evil.  People,  on  the  pleasantest  day,  if  you 
say,  "  It  is  a  pleasant  day,"  will  look  all  around  the 
sky  to  see  if  they  cannot  find  a  weather -breeder 
somewhere  that  will  promise  a  storm  to-morrow. 
They  will  shoulder  upon  themselves  and  be  crushed 
down  by  a  hundred  burdens  that  they  have  not  the 
least  assurance  in  the  world  that  they  will  ever  be 
called  on  to  bear.  One-half  at  least  of  the  burdens 
we  carry,  and  that  crush  our  hearts  and  make  us  sad, 
are  pure  shadow  trials  of  which  we  have  no  business 
to  take  any  account. 

And  then  there  is  another  grand  source  of  sorrow 
and  discomfort  that  comes  to  people,  oh,  to  so  many 


THE  WORLD.  2 1 


— ennui  —  the  feeling  that  their  life  is  useless  and 
aimless,  purely  for  the  reason  that  they  have  not 
some  grand,  noble  thing  to  do  to  wake  up  their 
enthusiasm,  to  stir  them,  to  lift  them  up,  to  make 
them  feel  their  life  is  worth  living.  People  will  live 
year  after  year  in  a  condition  like  this  when  the 
world  is  not  half  finished,  hardly  begun,  and  on  every 
hand  is  work  calling,  begging,  appealing  to  be  done, 
if  men  would  only  find  it ;  if  women  would  only  find 
it.  I  think  it  is  just  to  say  that  women  in  high  states 
of  civilization  are  the  ones  that  suffer  most  from  this, 
almost  for  the  simple  reason  that  either  their  sense 
of  propriety  or  their  habits  or  training,  or  something 
or  other,  keeps  them  from  going  out  into  the  world 
and  finding  something  to  engage  their  hand  and 
heart,  and  to  fill  up  the  measure  and  fullness  of  their 
enthusiasm. 

The  Question  answered. 

These  then,  with  others  that  I  shall  leave  you  to 
think  of,  are  the  grand  burdens  under  which  we  suf- 
fer. And  as  I  said,  they  are  burdens  that  you  need 
not  carry,  or  at  least  you  need  not  carry  to  one-half 
the  extent  which  you  do.  What,  then,  in  a  word  of 
suggestion,  in  the  light  of  these  truths  that  I  have 
outlined,  in  the  light  of  these  burdens  needlessly 
borne,  what,  in  the  summing  up,  have  I  a  right  to  say 
that  we  may  reasonably  expect  of  the  world  .'*     Here 


22  LIFE    QUESTIONS. 

we  are ;  each  one  of  us  having  come  into  this  world 
as  the  scene  of  our  activity  and  enjoyment  or  suffer- 
ing. What  may  we  expect  reasonably  to  gain  by  it  ? 
The  world  offers  —  and  you  have  no  claim  on  it  by 
which  you  may  assume  that  it  would  offer  anything 
else  —  the  world  offers  opportunity.  Here  for  exam- 
ple is  an  opportunity  for  you  to  enter  into  all  this 
wondrous  mysterious  universe  of  beauty.  Oh,  how 
blindly  we  walk  over  the  face  of  this  marvel  of  a 
world !  We  stumble  along  amid  the  grass  and  the 
flowers.  Some  one  comes  behind  us  that  can  appre- 
ciate their  beauty  and  their  mystery,  and  bows  down 
before  them  awe-struck,  at  the  marvel  and  over- 
whelmed with  the  wonder  that  we  neglect  and  scorn. 
The  world  all  around  us  is  one  marvel  of  wonder  and 
beauty  ;  and  the  key  to  it  is  what .''  Thought,  culti- 
vation, appreciation  of  every  opportunity,  purity  of 
heart  and  thought  on  our  part.  Until  we  attain  this 
the  world  will  be  locked  to  us  wherever  we  are.  Put 
any  man  into  the  finest  picture  gallery  of  the  world, 
surround  him  with  superior  works  of  art,  but  if  he 
have  not  purity  of  heart  and  appreciation,  something 
of  self-development  and  culture,  there  is  a  veil  drawn 
over  every  beauty  and  nothing  is  open  to  him.  If 
you  will  only  fit  yourself  to  appreciate  it  the  world 
offers  you  limitless  mystery  and  beauty. 

It  affords  you  an  opportunity  in  another  direction  — 
an  opportunity  of  doing  some  good  service.     People 


THE   WORLD. 


23 


talk  about  the  world's  being  full.  You  remember 
that  saying  of  Daniel  Webster's,  that  advice  of  his  to 
a  young  lawyer  who  asked  him  if  there  was  any  room 
in  the  legal  profession.  He  said  there  was  "  room 
enough  at  the  top."  We  feel  perhaps  in  regard  to 
the  mechanical  development  of  the  world  that  almost 
everything  has  been  invented  that  can  be.  But  every 
little  while  somebody  startles  the  world  with  some 
new  mechanical  contrivance.  We  feel  that  every 
great  subject  for  poetry  has  been  written  upon  ;  until 
some  man  with  a  deeper  insight  startles  the  world 
with  a  fresh  masterpiece.  There  is  room  enough, 
there  is  opportunity  everywhere.  The  world  is  not 
exhausted;  hardly  the  surface  has  been  scratched. 
There  is  just  as  much  opportunity  for  the  grand  ser- 
vice of  man  —  for  heroism,  for  nobility,  for  devotion 
—  as  there  ever  was.  Perhaps  we  shall  not  become 
distinguished  for  the  doing  of  these  things  that  we 
can  perform.  No  matter ;  you  had  better  be  fit  for 
an  office  than  to  be  in  it ;  you  had  better  be  worthy 
of  fame  than  to  get  it ;  you  had  better  be  worthy  of 
love  and  all  men's  honor  than  to  have  them  at  your 
feet  and  know  in  your  own  heart  that  you  are  hollow 
and  a  sham.  There  is  opportunity  to  be,  there  is 
opportunity  to  do  as  noble  things  as  the  world  has  ever 
dreamed.  Here  is  the  secret  of  content,  and  you 
will  never  find  it  anywhere  else.  I  appeal  to  you  to- 
day, to  look  through  all  your  past  life  while  I  tell  you 


24  LIFE   QUESTIONS. 

it  is  true  of  my  own  experience,  and  to  ask  yourself 
if  it  is  not  true  of  yours,  that  the  solidest  comfort  you 
have  ever  attained  has  been  when  you  have  waked 
up  to  the  consciousness  that  you  have  been  of  some 
little  use  to  somebody,  that  you  have  done  some 
good  to  the  world.  There  is,  then,  an  opportunity 
for  happiness  as  well  as  beauty  and  service.  There 
is  no  one  of  you  that  has  not  about  him  abundant 
opportunities  for  happiness  in  this  poor  old  world 
that  we  call  sin-sick  and  corrupt  and  evil.  You  may 
have  a  friend  if  you  will  only  prove  yourself  worthy 
of  one  by  being  a  noble  and  true  friend  yourself. 
You  may  gain  the  love  of  some  man  or  woman  noble 
as  you  deserve  and  perhaps  a  good  deal  nobler.  You 
may  have  a  home,  children  of  your  own,  or  others, 
loving  you  and  looking  up  to  your  face  with  worship, 
and  playing  about  your  feet.  You  have  all  the  mate- 
rials out  of  which  to  construct  a  song  sweet  as  the 
choiring  stars  above  you.  The  only  condition  is  that 
you  shall  make  your  lives  as  bright  and  orderly  as 
the  stars. 


Swontr  ^mQiion. 


WHAT   IS   THE    RELATION    OF    THE    BODY    TO    THE    MIND 

AND     SOUL  ? 


W/ia^   is  Manf 

If  we  should  stand  for  the  first  time  in  the  presence 
of  another  man,  and  try  to  find  out  what  sort  of  a 
being  he  is,  what  would  be  the  result  ?  In  the  first 
place,  of  course,  the  outline  and  bulk  of  his  body 
would  be  apparent.  If  there  were  an  anatomist  by 
he  would  tell  us  the  bones  of  which  the  inner 
structure  of  this  body  were  composed.  The  physi- 
ologist would  tell  us  about  the  muscles  and  the 
organs,  their  relations,  their  functions,  the  part  they 
play  in  this  mechanism.  The  chemist  would  tell  us 
of  what  elements  the  body  is  made ;  how  much 
water,  how  much  lime,  how  much  this,  that  and  the 
other  go  to  make  it  up.  The  artist  would  look  at  it 
from  the  standpoint  of  beauty.  And  so  each  one, 
according  to  the  trend  of  his  thought  and  investiga- 
tion, would  help  us  to  form  our  complete  conception 
of  the  external  or  physical  man.     But  if  we  raise  the 


26  ^JFE  QUESTIONS. 


question,  Is  this  all  of  him  ?  we  shall  find  out  that 
from  the  first  dawn  of  human  history  until  now, 
practically  all  men  everywhere  —  there  have  been 
few  exceptions  —  have  believed  that  this  was  not  all. 
They  have  said,  inside  of  this  physical  frame,  located 
at  some  particular  point,  or  diffused  through  it,  is  a 
spiritual  entity ;  somewhere  about  this  physical  man 
there  is  another  somewhat  called  mind,  soul,  shade, 
spirit,  or  whatever  name  may  have  been  applied  to  it. 
Sometimes  they  have  spoken  of  two  or  three  invisible 
tenants,  or  invisible  under  ordinary  circumstances, 
though  capable  of  manifesting  themselves  at  times 
to  the  eye,  to  the  ear,  to  the  touch.  Paul  divides 
man,  in  one  of  his  epistles,  into  three  parts,  a  sort  of 
human  trinity,  the  body,  the  animal  soul  and  spirit 
or  immortal  soul.  I  am  not  now  going  into  the  varie- 
ties of  thought  concerning  these  subjects,  the  origin 
of  the  belief,  nor  the  line  of  its  development.  These 
questions  lie  outside  of  my  present  purpose.  But 
I  must,  in  passing,  give  you  two  or  three  principal 
theories  that  have  been  held  concerning  the  relation 
in  which  body  and  mind  stand  to  each  other. 

Abstract  Theories. 

There  is  a  body,  and  there  is  a  something  we  call 
mind.  The  school  of  materialists,  ancient  and  mod- 
ern, whatever  difference  of  form  their  speculations 


THE  BODY. 


27 


may  take,  teach  us  that  the  mind  is  in  some  myste- 
rious way  a  product  of  the  bodily  organization  ;  and 
they  tell  us  that  when  the  body  is  taken  to  pieces  by 
death,  the  mind  itself  will  dissolve  and  cease  to  exist 
as  a  separate  entity.  Mind,  then,  according  to  the 
materialist,  is  the  product  of  the  body.  There  is 
another  school,  and  that  ancient  and  modern,  which 
holds  to  the  pre-existence  of  this  mind  or  soul,  and 
they  teach  the  precise  contrary  of  the  materialists ; 
that  is,  they  say  the  mind  existed  first,  and  it  has 
shaped  the  body  to  itself,  making  of  it  a  fitting 
instrument.  So,  while  the  one  school  teaches  that 
the  mind  is  the  result  of  body,  the  other  teaches  that 
the  body  is  the  result  of  mind.  There  is  another 
school  of  thought  still,  connected  with  the  famous 
name  of  the  great  philosopher,  Leibnitz,  who  taught 
what  he  called  the  pre-established  harmony  ;  that  is, 
he  could  not  understand  how  the  body  could  act  on 
mind,  or  mind  could  act  on  body,  and  so  he  taught 
the  doctrine  that  God,  from  the  first,  established 
a  sort  of  harmonious  relation  between  these  two, 
designating  definitely  their  influence.  So  that  when 
I  think  of  moving  my  arm  the  arm  moves  ;  but  he 
says  it  is  not  the  thought  that  makes  it  move ;  only 
God  has  established  such  a  relation  between  the 
thought  and  the  arm  that  they  move  together ;  when 
the  thought  wishes  the  arm  to  move  the  arm  moves : 
and    so   concerning   every  other  mental  or  physical 


28  LIFE  QUESTIONS. 


operation.  Still  another  school,  represented  chiefly 
by  Spinoza,  teaches  the  doctrine  of  pantheism.  This 
holds  that  God  himself  is  the  only  real  substance 
in  the  universe,  the  only  substantial  being,  and  that 
matter  and  mind  both  are  only  local  and  temporary 
manifestations  of  God  —  only  waves  rising  for  a 
moment  and  sinking  again  into  the  sea  of  eternal  and 
everlasting  being  which  is  God.  These  are  the  four 
grand  theories  that  have  been  held  concerning  the 
relation  of  the  mind  and  the  body. 

W/iai  do  we  Know  about  It? 

Now,  I  propose  to  come  simply  and  directly  to  the 
question,  How  much  do  we  really  know  about  it.'' 
what  do  we  know  about  mind .-'  what  do  we  know 
about  body,  and  the  relation  they  sustain  to  each 
other.?  Directly,  we  know  nothing  at  all  about  either 
of  them,  as  to  what  they  are  in  their  essence.  We 
know  nothing  at  all  about  matter  in  itself ;  we  know 
nothing  at  all  about  mind  in  itself.  All  that  we  do 
know  is  certain  facts  of  consciousness.  For  example, 
I  touch  this  book.  I  receive  an  impression  of  some- 
thing hard  and  smooth.  This  touch  is  transmitted 
by  the  nerves  to  the  brain,  and  in  some  mysterious 
way  —  I  know  not,  and  nobody  knows  —  I  become 
conscious  of  touching  something  that  resists  my 
touch,  and  that  is  smooth  to  my  hand.     I  infer  the 


THE   BODY. 


29 


existence  of  something  possessing  those  qualities 
that  I  call  hardness  and  smoothness.  This  is  the 
only  knowledge  we  have  of  this  external  world. 
People  sometimes  seem  to  think  they  know  all  about 
matter;  but  you  know  nothing  at  all  except  by  this 
method  of  inference  from  your  various  sensations. 

What  do  we  know  about  mind .''  Our  knowledge 
about  mind  is  of  precisely  the  same  kind  —  an  infer- 
ence from  consciousness.  I  think.  I  infer,  then,  that 
there  is  something  that  corresponds  to  this  sensation 
of  thought.  I  have  a  feeling  of  love,  of  hate,  of  fear, 
of  hope.  I  infer  that  there  is  something  that  thinks, 
something  that  loves,  something  that  hopes,  some- 
thing that  fears. 

And  here  comes  a  distinction  that  I  wish  to  make 
very  clear  in  its  impression  upon  your  minds.  Matter 
translates  itself  into  my  consciousness  as  something 
having  length,  breadth,  thickness,  hardness  or  power 
of  resistance,  color,  weight,  and  other  attributes  with 
which  you  are  perfectly  familiar.  Things  which 
manifest  themselves  to  me  in  this  way  I  call  matter. 
But  the  thought  of  the  mind,  love,  hope,  fear — these 
things  have  no  thickness,  they  have  no  length,  they 
have  no  breadth,  they  have  no  weight,  they  have  no 
color.  There  is,  then,  so  far  as  we  know  anything 
about  it,  not  simply  a  difference  between  these  two, 
but  an  absolute  unlikeness.  Now,  then,  as  I  said  a 
moment   ago,    the    materialist    sometimes    talks    as 


30  LIFE    QUESTIONS. 

though  he  knew  all  about  matter,  but  knew  nothing 
about  mind.  If  he  will  think  a  little  more  deeply,  he 
will  find  that  he  knows  just  as  much  about  mind  as 
he  does  about  matter;  and  that,  as  to  what  they  are 
in  themselves,  he  knows  nothing  at  all  about  either  of 
them.  We  only  infer  certain  things  from  these  facts 
of  consciousness.  Here,  then,  is  what  we  know 
concerning  what  matter  is,  and  what  mind  is.  But 
we  do  know  that  these  two  somewhats  are  related 
to  each  other  in  some  mysterious  way ;  in  such  a  way 
that  the  body  acts  upon  the  mind,  and  the  mind  in 
its  turn  reacts  upon  the  body ;  or,  if  you  choose  to 
start  the  other  way,  the  mind  acts  and  the  body 
reacts.  There  is  mutual  action  and  reaction  between 
the  body  and  the  mind.  And  how  important  and 
mighty  this  movement  of  action  and  reaction  is  I 
propose  to  illustrate  by  reading  just  a  few  words 
from  a  book  which  I  have  in  my  hand.  In  No.  3  of 
the  Popular  Science  Monthly  Supplement  is  an  arti- 
cle by  Mr.  Frederick  Harrison  on  the  subject  of  "  The 
soul  and  the  future  life."  In  it  he  uses  these  words  — 
I  read  them  because,  in  a  compact  and  simple  way, 
they  express  all  that  I  wish  to  bring  before  you 
better  than  I  could  state  it: 

"  Man  is  one,  however  compound.  Fire  his  con- 
science and  he  blushes ;  check  his  circulation  and 
he  thinks  wildly  or  not  at  all ;  impair  his  secretions 
and  the  moral  sense  is  dulled,  discolored  or  depraved ; 


THE  BODY.  31 


his  aspirations  flag,  his  hope  and  love  both  reel ; 
impair  them  still  more  and  he  becomes  a  brute.  A 
cup  of  drink  degrades  his  moral  nature  below  that  of 
a  swine.  Again,  a  violent  emotion  of  pity  or  horror 
makes  him  vomit.  A  lancet  will  restore  him  from 
delirium  to  clear  thought.  Excessive  thought  will 
waste  his  energy.  Excess  of  muscular  exercise  will 
deaden  thought.  An  emotion  will  double  the  strength 
of  his  muscles ;  and  at  last  a  prick  of  a  needle  or  a 
grain  of  mineral  will  in  an  instant  lay  to  rest  forever 
his  body  and  its  unity." 

That  sets  forth  in  a  very  forcible  way  the  power 
which  the  mind  has  on  the  body,  and  which  the  body 
has  on  the  mind.  By  ill  using  the  body  you  are 
perfectly  aware  that  you  can  utterly  destroy  mental 
power,  and  lay  it,  so  far  as  we  know  upon  this  earth, 
at  rest  forever.  And  it  is  not  simply  in  story  books 
or  in  poems  that  you  come  across  the  facts  of  the 
marvelous  power  which  the  mind  has  over  the  body. 
There  are  perfectly  well-authenticated  cases,  in  medi- 
cal treatises  and  in  scientific  works,  of  the  mind's 
having  had  the  power  to  disease  the  body,  to  cripple 
it,  and  even  to  put  it  to  death.  Not  alone  in  poetry  do 
men  die  of  a  broken  heart,  I  believe  that  the  reality 
of  death  from  broken  heart  is  just  as  real  as  death 
from  fever  or  from  consumption. 


32  LIFE    QUESTIONS. 


The  Power  of  the  Body  over  the  MtJtd. 

So  mighty  is  the  power  of  the  mind  over  the  body. 
But  the  point  which  I  wish  to  dwell  upon  more  espe- 
cially now,  is  the  power  of  the  body  over  the  mind. 
Let  me  give  you  in  two  or  three  ascending  grades  of 
thought,  some  illustration  of  what  I  mean.  You  are 
perfectly  familiar  with  the  idea  that  as  you  rise  in  the 
morning  your  bodily  condition  may  make  all  the 
difference  in  the  world  with  the  weather  or  aspect 
that  the  day  shall  present  to  you.  A  headache,  the 
result,  perhaps,  of  a  late  supper  or  of  the  dyspepsia, 
may  not  only  be  able  to  clothe  the  earth  in  gloom, 
and  drape  the  heavens  in  blackness,  but  spread  a  pall 
over  life  so  black  that  it  does  not  seem  to  you  worth 
living.  The  condition  of  the  body,  then,  touches 
very  intimately  the  question  of  happiness.  It  touches 
no  less  intimately  the  conditions  of  good  work  in  the 
world.  Here  is  a  thing  very  simple  and  yet  far- 
reaching  and  true,  that  the  best  work  of  the  world, 
the  healthiest,  noblest  work,  has  always  been  done  by 
healthy  physiques,  by  strong  bodies,  by  good  diges- 
tions. One  of  the  most  important  things  in  the 
world  for  a  man  who  will  do  nobly  and  faithfully  his 
life  work,  is  the  condition  in  which  he  shall  keep  his 
body.  One  of  the  most  important  do  I  say }  Why 
it  is  all  important ;  more  so,  perhaps,   than  almost 


TEE  BODY. 


33 


anything  else.  For  whatever  the  mind  may  be  able 
to  do  in  another  sphere,  whatever  it  may  be  able  to  do 
when  finally  separated  from  this  body,  we  know  that 
here  mental  and  spiritual  action  depend  entirely  upon 
physical  conditions.  It  has  been  a  popular  doctrine 
that  the  body  was  a  sort  of  veil,  a  covering,  the 
prison-house  of  the  soul ;  and  you  hear  it  many  a  time 
in  poetry,  in  song,  in  popular  pulpit  discourse,  this 
talk  of  the  body  being  a  drag  upon  the  soul,  and  of 
how  we  will  mount  up  on  wings  as  light  as  air  when 
once  the  body  is  broken  down  and  we  are  free.  It  is 
all  a  fancy  and  a  dream.  That  is,  there  is  not  one 
single  thing  that  we  know  that  looks  that  way  in  the 
slightest.  So  far  as  we  know  anything  about  it  the 
body  is  not  an  obtsruction  to  the  soul,  the  body  is 
not  a  prison-house  ;  the  body  is  not  a  bandage,  bind- 
ing and  crippling  and  limiting  its  freedom  and  its 
power.  It  is  the  divinely  appointed  medium  of  men- 
tal and  spiritual  manifestation  ;  the  only  means  by 
which  we  come  in  contact  with  the  universe  of  God 
and  our  fellowmen.  I  know  nothing  about  what  the 
conditions  of  life  may  be  when  the  soul  is  finally 
freed  from  the  body,  but  so  far  as  this  life  is  con- 
cerned the  power  of  the  spirit,  the  power  of  the  mind 
over  the  world  is  limited  by  and  conditioned  on  the 
physical  condition,  physical  health,  and  physical  fit- 
ness for  the  work  we  have  to  do.  If  there  were 
either  an  angel  or  a  God  under  the  dome  of  the  skull, 

3 


34  LIFE   QUESTIONS. 

his  ability  to  work  in  this  world  would  be  limited  and 
conditioned  by  the  brain.  No  matter  how  magnifi 
cent  mental  power  may  be,  it  is  limited,  I  say,  and 
conditioned  by  the  instrument  with  which  it  must 
work  in  coming  into  contact  with  this  physical  life 
that  we  live  here  beneath  the  stars.  If  Hercules 
should  come  again  to  earth,  and  instead  of  his  club  you 
should  put  into  his  hands  a  brittle  reed  and  compel 
him  to  work  and  strike  with  that,  it  would  not  be  the 
power  of  Hercules,  it  would  be  simply  the  power  of 
the  reed.  He  would  be  limited  by  the  instrument 
with  which  he  must  work.  Take  the  magnificent 
power  of  steam ;  if  you  enclose  it  within  a  weak,  ill- 
constructed  or  broken  engine,  you  have  not  the 
almost  omnipotence  of  steam  at  your  disposal ;  you 
have  simply  a  crippled  and  broken  engine.  Take  an 
artist  and  give  him  poor  canvas,  and  poor  pigments, 
and  a  poor  brush,  and  he  cannot  display  his  real 
power ;  you  have  limited  him  by  the  instruments  and 
by  the  materials  with  which  he  must  work.  So,  I 
say,  whatever  this  mental  or  moral  power  of  the 
brain  may  be,  it  is  limited  by  the  condition  of  the 
brain ;  and  the  condition  of  the  brain  is  limited  by 
the  condition  of  the  body,  which  is  the  basis  and  con- 
dition of  all  high  mental  and  spiritual  work.  I  say, 
then,  that  the  body  has  power  to  cripple  all  the  noble 
work  that  you  might  be  able  to  do.  There  are  a  few 
cases  that  are  apparently  exceptions  to  this  rule  — 


THE   BODY. 


35 


geniuses  and  poets  who  were  physically  diseased 
throughout  their  whole  lives.  But  you  may  go 
through  the  whole  list  from  every  ancient  and  civil- 
ized nation  of  the  world,  and  pick  out  those  that  did 
work  under  conditions  of  disease,  and  you  will  find 
traces  of  that  disease  marring  and  crippling,  or  lim- 
iting the  results.  Rounded,  complete  mental  work 
has  only  been  done  by  minds  that  sat  enthroned  in 
healthy  brains. 

Iiiflueiice  of  the  Body  on  Morals  and  Religion. 

Not  only  that,  but  moral  conditions  are  determined 
very  largely  by  the  condition  of  the  body.  A  promi- 
nent scientific  man  in  Germany,  after  having  spent 
years  in  studying  the  skulls  and  brains  of  criminals, 
has  made  this  assertion  ;  that  not  once  in  his  whole 
life  has  he  found  a  confirmed  and  chronic  criminal 
who  had  a  healthy  brain.  Where  do  chronic  pauper- 
ism and  chronic  vice  and  chronic  crimes  of  our  great 
cities  come  from  .-•  In  exceptional  cases  —  perhaps 
no  exception  to  this  law,  however,  if  we  could  trace 
them  —  in  exceptional  cases  they  come  from  the 
families  with  healthy  ancestry,  and  living  in  the 
midst  of  healthy  conditions  ;  but  nine  out  of  ten, 
ninety-nine  out  of  a  hundred,  come  out  of  impure 
sanitary  and  physical  conditions,  where  the  very  air 
is  miasma,  disease  and  death. 


LIFE    QUESTIONS. 


Not  only  morals,  but  even  religions,  the  distorted 
conceptions  of  God,  the  theological  infamies  of  the 
past,  the  libels  on  the  divine  character,  the  shapes  of 
demoniac  power  and  hate  that  we  see  conjured  from 
the  depths  of  darkness  —  all  these,  without  exception, 
have  come  from  diseased,  distorted,  unhealthy  physi- 
cal conditions  of  the  world ;  come  from  those  times 
of  half-development,  when  the  brain  itself  was 
hardly  human  ;  when  man  had  not  learned  the  power 
by  which  he  is  subjected,  the  underlying  forces  of  the 
world  about  him  ;  when  he  looked  upon  the  lightning, 
the  storm,  the  pestilence,  the  famine,  the  cold  and 
the  hunger  as  spirit  enemies  that  sought  to  destroy 
him.  These  theologies  that  to-day  make  the  popular 
God  a  Moloch,  the  theologies  that  teach  such  dis- 
torted and  hopeless  thoughts  concerning  man,  the 
theologies  that  people  the  heavens  above  us  and  the 
future  with  shapes  of  horror  —  they  are  simply  un- 
healthy dreams  that  haunt  man's  waking  hours. 
They  have  come  out  of  physical  unhealth  and  physi- 
cal incapacity  reaching  up  so  as  to  grasp,  as  it  were, 
the  powers  of  thought  and  love  and  hope  that  we  call 
the  mental  and  spiritual  forces  of  man.  Such  then, 
reaching  from  the  simple  beginning  of  happiness  up 
through  the  centres  of  life  to  morals  and  to  God  — 
such  is  the  sweep  and  scope  of  this  power  which  the 
body  and  its  conditions  are  able  to  exercise  over  the 
mind,  the  heart,  and  the  soul. 


TEE  BODY. 


Z7 


The  Duty   of  Physical  Development. 

You  ought,  then  —  and  here  is  one  result  follow- 
ing from  these  thoughts,  if  I  have  placed  them 
clearly  before  you  —  you  ought,  you  that  are  fathers 
and  mothers  in  your  homes,  to  make  it  your  first 
care  to  see  to  it  that  the  children  grow  up  physically 
strong  and  well.  And  I  wish  to  warn  you  and  to 
put  you  on  guard  concerning  the  matter  of  schools 
—  the  mental  development  of  your  children.  So 
far  as  the  future  of  your  boy  or  girl  is  concerned, 
the  capacity  to  do  the  work  that  will  be  laid  upon 
their  shoulders  by  and  by,  to  carry  life's  burdens, 
more  than  on  everything  else  this  capacity  depends 
on  the  simple  matter  as  to  whether  the  boy  or  girl  is 
or  is  not  healthy.  Knowledge  of  music,  knowledge 
of  mathematics,  knowledge  of  history,  knowledge  of 
anything  is  insignificant  compared  with  the  question 
as  to  whether,  when  they  stand  on  the  border  land  of 
manhood  and  womanhood,  they  stand  there  physical- 
ly strong  and  well.  There  is  a  lesson  here  of  charity 
as  indicated  in  what  I  have  said  concerning  the  moral 
and  theological  perversions,  crimes,  distortions  and 
diseased  ideas  of  the  world.  Not  that  these  things 
are  made  right  merely  because  they  spring  out  of 
physical  conditions ;  but  remember  at  any  rate  that 
they  are  matters  largely  beyond  individual  control, 


144677 


38  LIFE    QUESTIONS. 

matters  to  be  delivered  from  by  slow  degrees ;  and 
let  charity  dwell  in  your  heart,  and  love  in  your 
nature,  and  encouragement  find  utterance  through 
your  voice.  And  remember  that  not  simply  by  build- 
ing churches,  not  simply  by  establishing  rituals,  rites, 
holidays,  and  scattering  bibles  and  good  books  over 
che  world  are  you  to  lift  up  the  moral  and  spiritual 
condition  of  man.  I  believe  that  the  souls  of  men 
would  be  helped  more  really  in  our  great  cities  by 
cleansing  the  slums,  lifting  up  these  low  places,  giv- 
ing men  good  air  to  breathe,  good  water  to  drink  and 
healthful  homes  to  live  in.  I  say  that  morals  and 
religion  would  be  helped  on  more  rapidly  by  these 
things  than  by  all  the  preaching  and  all  the  mag- 
nificent rituals  of  long  ages ;  for  these  things  are  at 
the  foundation  of  it  all. 

Practical  Applications. 

The  practical  outcome  of  this  and  the  lessons  that 
I  wish  to  enforce  upon  your  minds  are  some  very 
commonplace  ones,  very  commonplace  indeed  ;  and 
yet,  because  commonplace,  exceedingly  important 
for  you  to  think  about  and  regard.  What  are  the 
conditions  of  keeping  the  body  in  health  so  that  the 
mind  may  be  free  and  clear  and  strong  .'*  There  are 
certain  things  that  are  beyond  our  control  that  I  will 
only  hint  at,  matters  of  inheritance  of  which  I  have 


THE  BODY. 


39 


spoken.  Then  there  may  be,  for  aught  we  know, 
emanations  from  the  earth,  electrical  currents  sweep- 
ing around  the  globe ;  influences  of  sun  and  planet 
and  stars  ;  forces  that  touch  us  when  we  do  not  know 
that  we  are  touched ;  things  that  lift  up  and  depress, 
concerning  which  we  have  no  practical  knowledge, 
and  if  we  had  knowledge  perhaps  we  should  have 
no  practical  power  to  control.  But  the  great  things 
are  the  very  small  things. 

Food. 

And  first  the  simple  matter  of  food.  It  used  to  be 
taught  that  the  student  and  the  religious  man  ought 
to  under-feed  themselves  ;  that  if  they  ate  too  much 
they  clogged  the  brain  and  interfered  with  mental 
progress.  Of  course  that  is  true,  if  one  eats  too  much. 
But  out  of  this  anxiety  not  to  eat  too  much  have 
grown  maxims  such  as  "  Always  rise  from  the  table 
while  you  are  hungry."  If  a  man  eats  so  rapidly 
that  he  may  get  a  good  deal  more  than  he  needs 
before  he  finds  it  out,  why,  he  had  better  rise  from  the 
table  hungry.  But  if  he  eats  slowly,  so  that  he 
knows  when  he  has  eaten  enough,  then  he  had  better 
eat  always  until  he  is  satisfied.  And  then  it  is  often 
said  that  people  eat  too  many  kinds  of  things,  and 
those  that  are  too  nice  in  quality.  It  is  said  that 
you  must  live  on  graham  bread,   oatmeal  mush,   on 


40  LIFE    QUESTIONS. 

this  thing  or  on  that ;  or  you  must  not  eat  more  than 
one  kind  of  thing  at  a  meal.  Do  not  think  these  are 
unimportant  things,  not  dignified  enough  to  be  spoken 
of  in  the  pulpit.  I  tell  you  they  reach  to  your  mind 
and  to  your  morals ;  they  reach  to  your  theology  ; 
they  reach  clear  to  heaven,  so  far  as  you  are  con- 
cerned, and  are  of  fundamental  importance,  touching 
your  religious  and  moral  life  a  good  deal  more,  some- 
times, than  what  you  think  about  the  Bible,  or  think 
about  Sunday,  or  think  about  any  other  religious 
institution  whatever.  What  shall  I  say,  then,  concern- 
ing this  matter  of  how  many  kinds  of  things  you 
may  eat .''  The  safest  rule  is,  so  far  as  they  are  within 
your  means,  eat  just  as  many  kinds  of  things  as  you 
want  and  can  get.  The  body  is  made  up  of  a  large 
number  of  chemical  constituents.  If  you  eat  only 
one  thing,  the  chances  are  that  you  will  supply  only 
a  part  of  the  wants  of  the  body.  Your  appetite,  if 
you  are  healthy,  is  a  good  guide.  Eat  enough,  then, 
and  eat  as  many  kinds  of  things  as  you  please.  Feed 
the  body,  feed  it  properly  and  feed  it  enough,  for  the 
sake  of  mind,  and  for  the  sake  of  character.  For  a 
diminution  of  food  may  not  only  render  one  insane, 
but  a  poor  quality  of  food  may  be  the  root,  not  only 
of  physical  deterioration,  but  of  moral  as  well.  If  I 
had  time  I  could  give  you  many  illustrations  of  this. 
Take  it  to-day  on  trust,  and  look  it  up  for  yourselves. 


THE   BODY 


41 


Sleep. 

And  the  next  most  important  matter  concerning 
health  is  sleep.  How  many  hours  shall  I  sleep  ? 
You  might  as  well  ask  how  much  water  a  sponge  will 
hold.  Try  it  and  find  out,  and  let  it  absorb  all  that  it 
will.  And  so  I  believe  that  it  is  not  simply  your 
right,  but  your  duty  to  sleep  all  that  you  can  sleep. 
Tedious  watching,  care  and  anxiety,  a  thousand 
things  may  interfere  to  rob  you  of  this,  which  is  a 
fundamental  condition  of  health.  And  yet  sleep  all 
you  can.  But  do  not  fall  into  this  error,  which  was 
so  common  a  few  years  ago  —  I  believe  it  is  being 
outgrown  —  this  thinking  it  is  a  virtue  on  the  part  of 
your  children  to  get  up  very  early  in  the  morning, 
before  they  have  slept  enough.  The  simple  fact  that 
you  want  to  sleep  is  God's  command,  as  sacred  as 
though  it  came  right  out  of  heaven  to  you,  to  sleep. 
The  desire  to  sleep  means  that  sleep  is  needed. 
There  is  no  rule,  then,  that  you  can  follow.  If  you 
are  compelled  to  sit  up  late,  then  sleep  late  in  the 
morning.  It  is  no  virtue  on  your  part  to  get  up 
early,  unless  you  have  slept  enough.  The  only 
virtue  about  it  is  to  get  up  when  you  have  slept  all 
that  the  body  needs,  and  all  that  the  brain  needs. 
And  particular  emphasis  ought  to  be  laid  upon  this 
matter,  concerning  those  in  business  or  in  the  pro- 


42  LIFE    QUESTIONS. 

fessions.  A  man  who  gets  up  at  six  o'clock  in  the 
morning  and  goes  to  work  in  the  mill,  or  with  the 
shovel,  or  with  the  axe,  may  sometimes  think  that  the 
professional  man  is  simply  lazy  and  self-indulgent, 
because  he  does  not  get  up  until  eight  o'clock  ;  when, 
perhaps,  after  the  day's  labor  he  himself  went  to 
sleep  at  eight  or  nine  o'clock,  and  has  slept  enough  : 
while  the  professional  is  kept  up  until  ten,  eleven, 
twelve,  or  two  o'clock.  And  then,  on  the  other 
hand,  he  overlooks  the  other  fundamental  fact  that 
he  who  performs  mere  physical  labor  can  rest  by 
simply  keeping  still,  whether  he  sleeps  or  not.  But 
there  is  no  way  of  resting  the  brain  except  by  sleep ; 
that  is,  the  brain  will  not  keep  still  except  it  is 
asleep.  So  that  the  professional  man,  or  the  man 
who  works  with  his  brain,  needs  more  sleep  than 
he  who  works  with  his  hands. 

Work. 

And  then  the  matter  of  labor ;  this  also  is  neces- 
sary to  health.  Something  to  do,  something  that 
shall  call  out  all  the  faculties.  And,  then,  the  matter 
of  recreation.  I  cannot  dwell  upon  these.  I  simply 
suggest  them  to  you.  Labor  and  recreation  are  just 
as  essential  to  health  as  food  and  sleep.  Now  there 
is  much  that  may  be  said  upon  the  other  side.  I  have 
dwelt  purposely  and  chiefly  on  the  effect  the  body 


THE  BODY. 


43 


has  upon  the  mind.  I  wish  to  close  now  with  some 
suggestions,  condensed  into  one,  concerning  the 
power  of  the  mind  over  the  body.  Keep  the  mind 
healthy,  because  if  the  mind  is  diseased  in  its  action, 
getting  unhealthy  and  morbid,  it  reacts  on  the  body, 
diseasing  that;  and  the  body  again  reacts  on  the 
mind,  and  makes  it  worse  than  it  was  to  begin  with. 
If  some  diseased  action  starts  in  the  body,  in  the 
hand,  or  in  any  other  organ,  it  causes  an  unusual  and 
unnatural  supply  of  blood  there  ;  that  raises  what  we 
call  an  inflammation,  and  this  intensifies  and  grows, 
increasing  the  diseased  action,  until,  if  it  be  not 
arrested  by  the  physical  forces  of  the  other  parts  of 
the  system,  it  results  in  death.  The  blood  produces 
an  increase  of  power  where  it  does  not  belong ;  pre- 
cisely as  though  a  mill  should  have  an  unusual  head 
of  water  turned  on.  If  you  turn  on  just  the  right 
quantity  of  water,  the  wheels  will  run  just  as  you 
want  them  to,  and  do  the  kind  of  work  you  wish 
them  to  do  ;  if  you  lessen  the  supply,  of  course  there 
is  want  of  action,  and  the  work  is  not  done  ;  if  you 
increase  it,  and  turn  it  into  a  flood,  there  is  activity, 
but  the  very  action  operates  to  the  destruction  of  the 
machinery.  Precisely  a  similar  thing  goes  on  in  the 
body  in  the  case  of  inflammation  of  this  kind. 


44  LIFE   QUESTIONS. 


Mental  Inflammation. 

And  a  similar  thing  goes  on  in  the  mind.  When 
there  is  excessive  action  of  the  mind  on  one  principle, 
or  upon  one  idea,  all  the  forces  of  the  being,  turn 
themselves  to  one  thought,  and  then  become  inflamed 
and  diseased,  until  the  person  becomes  one-sided. 
Carry  it  far  enough,  and  it  is  what  we  call  insanity; 
carry  it  a  little  less  far,  and  you  have  the  hobby 
rider,  the  one-idea  man,  the  man  who  never  thinks  of 
anything,  and  who  cannot  think  of  anything,  except 
his  notion.  It  works,  however,  in  more  serious 
directions.  There  are  hobby  riders  who  carry  this 
excessive  mental  action  in  one  direction  until  they 
become  insane.  There  are  men  and  women  who,  for 
one  cause  and  another,  carry  a  similar  action  of  the 
mind  to  such  an  extent  that  they  become  diseased 
concerning  the  real  work  of  the  world.  Take  the 
penitent,  for  example.  Suppose  you  have  done 
wrong,  been  guilty  of  a  crime.  What  of  it  .-*  It  is 
past.  It  is  of  no  use  to  sit  down  and  weep  over  it, 
and  concentrate  your  thoughts  upon  it.  Leave  it ; 
fling  it  out  of  sight ;  concentrate  your  thought  on 
something  else,  lest  you  become  diseased  and  morbid 
in  this  direction,  and  unfit  for  the  work  of  the  world. 
Overbalance  this  by  counter  irritation.  Live  in  some 
other   realm,    in    some    other    department   of    your 


THE  BODY. 


45 


thought,    and    thus    become   healthy   and    redeemed 
from  these  morbid  influences  of  the  past. 

To  come  to  a  more  sensitive  point  still,  but  not 
the  less  important,  concerning  affliction  or  loss.  You 
have  lost  some  dear  friend.  Some  one  that  was  your 
life,  the  centre  of  your  heart  and  of  your  affection. 
It  becomes  with  you  almost  a  religion  to  cherish  that 
memory,  to  think  of  that  and  let  the  world  alone,  to 
sit  down  beside  this  grave  in  the  past  and  let  the 
great  work  of  the  world  go  undone  so  far  as  you  are 
concerned.  This,  when  carried  too  far,  ceases  to  be 
simply  a  memory,  and  becomes  a  disease.  Do  not 
cherish  even  your  griefs,  then,  over  much.  Remem- 
ber what  you  can  do  in  other  paths  to  the  poor, 
grieved  hearts  still  throbbing,  to  assist  those  that  are 
not  yet  permitted  to  lie  down  to  sleep,  the  sorrows 
all  around  you  that  you  can  heal.  Then,  overcome 
this  private  grief  by  turning  your  attention  in  anoth- 
er direction,  living  in  another  part  of  your  being,  and 
making  yourself  useful  and  helpful  to  the  world. 


WHAT  IS  GOOD  SOCIETY  AND  HOW  AM  I  RELATED  TO  IT  ? 


Two  Meanings  of  Society. 

You  will  understand  of  course  that  I  wish  a  dis- 
tinction to  be  drawn  between  the  broader  and  the 
narrower  senses  of  the  word,  society.  When  we  say 
that  man  is  a  social  animal,  we  mean  that  instead 
of  living  by  himself  it  is  his  nature  to  congre- 
gate, to  aggregate  into  communities,  into  villages, 
cities,  states  and  nations.  We  mean  something  else, 
something  much  narrower,  something  quite  distinct, 
when  we  speak  about  the  best  society,  or  good  society, 
or  when  we  talk  about  a  person's  going  into  society. 
It  is  this  less  and  narrower  sense,  which  needs  no 
further  distinction,  that  I  wish  you  to  keep  in  mind, 
and  about  which  I  am  to  speak.  To  some  minds  this 
might  appear  to  be  a  secular  topic  better  fitted  for  a 
lecture  than  a  sermon  ;  and  yet,  when  you  reflect  how 
large  a  part  of  the  ordinary  life  of  the  world  to-day 
finds  expression   in  what  we  call  society,  you  will 


SOCIETY. 


47 


agree  with  me,  I  think,  that  the  rights,  the  duties, 
the  obligations  in  which  we  stand  to  each  other,  as 
thus  related,  is  something  quite  important  enough  to 
be  brought  within  the  domain  of  moral  and  religious 
teaching. 

Ideas  around  which  Society  has  Crystallized. 

First  I  wish  to  bring  before  your  minds  the  differ- 
ent ideas  around  which  society  has  been  accustomed, 
in  the  past,  to  crystallize  itself.  The  oldest  good 
society  on  the  face  of  the  earth,  so  far  as  we  know, 
is  that  which  was  represented  by  the  old  families, 
the  patrician  class  for  example,  in  ancient  Rome ; 
those  that  have  behind  them  a  long  line  of  ancestry  ; 
those  that  can  speak  of  themselves  as  ancient  fami- 
lies ;  who  are  proud  of  the  achievements,  the  repu- 
tations, the  renown  of  their  forefathers.  Now  I 
believe,  as  we  must,  who  have  studied  this  question 
at  all,  that  it  is  just  as  true  of  man  as  it  is  anywhere 
else,  that  blood  will  tell.  A  farmer  manifests  his 
faith  in  this  principle  when  he  seeks  out  the  finest 
variety  of  pear  or  grape,  when  he  seeks  to  graft  on 
to  the  old  variety  some  new  species,  some  higher 
and  finer  and  juicier  development  than  he  has  been 
able  to  grow  upon  the  old  stock.  We  recognize  it 
everywhere  in  the  animal  world ;  and  I  believe  it  is 
just  as  true  in  the  case  of  man.     This  idea  sprung 


48  LIFE    QUESTIONS. 

first  from  the  pretensions  of  the  old  families  of  kings 
and  nobles  that  they  did  indeed  have  a  distinct  and 
separate  origin  from  that  of  the  great  mass  and  ma- 
jority of  men.  The  Emperors  of  Peru  and  Mexico, 
when  the  Spaniards  came  to  this  new  world,  asserted 
for  themselves  the  claim  familiar  from  the  first  dawn 
of  history  in  Europe,  Asia  and  Africa,  that  their 
ancestors  were  divine,  that  they  were  children  of  the 
sun ;  the  sun  looked  upon  as  a  deity,  a  god.  And 
there  is  an  ancient  Hindoo  tradition  traced  to  the 
Laws  of  Manu.  This  tradition  is  the  origin  of  the 
system  of  caste  as  it  exists  in  India  to-day.  It  asserts 
that  the  Creator  made  the  Brahmins  out  of  his  brain 
—  of  his  head ;  that  is  the  highest  caste.  That  he 
created  the  soldiers  out  of  his  arms,  his  shoulders  and 
his  breast  ;  that  the  artisans  and  agriculturists  were 
created  out  of  his  thighs  and  his  loins ;  and  that  the 
servants  sprung  from  his  feet.  They  had  then,  a 
distinct  and  separate  origin  for  all  these  castes  and 
classes  of  men  from  the  highest  to  the  lowest ;  they 
believed  they  were  distinct ;  and  on  any  account, 
consequently,  could  not  be  fused  together.  I  say  I 
believe  there  is  something  noble  about  this  tradition 
of  a  grand  ancestry.  I  can  understand  the  pride  of 
the  old  Spaniard,  who  called  himself  an  Hidalgo  — 
son  of  somebody. 

But  this  rule  does  not  work  succesfully  down  from 
the  first  to  the  last,  and  we  find  that  the  principle 


SOCIETY.  49 


finally  runs  itself  completely  out.  The  sons  of  noble 
fathers  are  not  always  themselves  noble.  The  sons 
of  the  wise  and  great  are  sometimes  stupid  and 
foolish,  because  other  blood  comes  in  and  it  is  impos- 
sible to  keep  the  quality  of  an  ancestry  like  this 
from  being  mixed  and  mingled  with  all  sorts  of 
foreign  changes  and  taints  that  shall  change  its  grain 
and  course.  And  it  has  been  found  that  this  form  of 
society  wears  itself  out  and  passes  away  because 
there  are  men  sprung  from  the  lowest  ranges  of 
society,  that  by  the  power  of  brain  and  heart  assert 
their  right  to  stand  at  the  front  and  lead  the  world. 
And  the  men  that  simply  had  great  fathers  are  com- 
pelled to  bow  before  the  great  son  of  a  father  who 
was  not  great.  And  so  I  say  this  principle  wears 
itself  out.  And  where  it  lingers  to-day,  the  remnant, 
the  last  played-out  fag-end  of  this  old  tradition  in 
the  F.  F.  Vs.  of  the  South  or  the  Van  Something-or- 
others  of  our  great  metropolis,  or  in  the  sons  of  those 
whose  fathers  were  somebody  or  something  in  our 
Colonial  history,  it  becomes  simply  a  theme  for 
amusement  and  ridicule.  And  who  is  there  of  us 
that  would  not  rather  be,  as  Napoleon  said  he  was, 
his  own  ancestor;  who  would  not  rather  have  our 
children  proud  of  us,  though  we  be  not  able  to  be 
proud  of  our  ancestry .-' 

The  next  principle  around  which  society  has  organ- 
ized itself  is  the  principle  of  wealth,  that  which  is 
4 


50  LIFE    QUESTIONS. 

dominant,  perhaps,  in  America  to-day.  Now  I  wish 
not  to  speak  one  word  slightingly  of  this,  but  to  be 
calmly  and  fairly  just  in  my  estimate  of  it.  A  man 
who  rightfully,  honorably  achieves  a  fortune,  has 
manifested  in  one  department  of  his  life,  in  one 
direction,  unusual  power  and  ability ;  and  he  deserves 
the  credit  that  belongs  to  masterhood  wherever  it  is 
capable  of  manifesting  itself.  But  remember,  the 
power  to  gain  and  acquire  wealth  is  only  one  side  of 
a  man.  And  when  we  measure  him,  as  measure  him 
we  must,  by  the  higher  standards  of  manhood,  we 
may  be  compelled  to  put  him  away  down  out  of  sight, 
beneath  the  feet  of  the  man  who  has  no  sort  of 
faculty  or  power  to  acquire  wealth,  because  this  is 
not  the  highest  and  grandest  faculty  of  manhood. 
The  man  of  wealth,  then,  to-day,  has  come  as  he 
should  come,  to  be  measured,  not  by  the  quantity  of 
wealth  that  he  may  acquire,  but  by  how  he  acquires 
it  and  how  he  uses  it  and  when  and  where.  That  is, 
this  simple  power  that  he  is  capable  of  manifesting  is 
coming  to  be  measured  by  the  dominant  moral  qual- 
ity of  the  world,  and  to  take  its  rank  where  it  belongs 
—  something  noble  and  true  and  to  be  honored,  but 
not  the  highest,  not  the  best.  And  society,  when  it 
organizes  itself  around  this  principle  alone,  when 
men  arrogate  to  themselves  superiority  over  their 
fellows,  simply  because  they  are  rich,  they  are  not  to 
be  respected  by  the  thoughtful  and  the  wise ;  they 
manifest  not  superiority  but  snobbery. 


SOCIETY. 


51 


Another  principle  around  which  society  is  aggre- 
gated is  that  of  intellectual  culture.  Here  again  is 
something  noble,  something  grand,  something  to  be 
honored.  And  this  culture,  this  learning  the  truth 
of  things,  this  finding  out  the  methods  of  God  in  the 
heavens,  in  the  earth ;  this  recovery  of  the  wisdom, 
the  thoughts,  the  purposes,  the  hopes,  the  fears  of 
the  past  —  these  are  freeing  the  world  gradually  from 
its  superstition  and  leading  it  out  of  intellectual  and 
moral  slavery  and  cowardice  into  the  possession  of 
its  own  manhood  and  freedom.  And  yet  there  is 
something  higher  even  than  a  man's  brain  ;  and  the 
society  that  organizes  itself  around  this  simply  is  not 
the  best  society.  For  character  is  above  brains,  and 
brain  is  of  worth  only  as  it  contributes  to  and  con- 
stitutes character.  So  that  when  little  knots  and 
coteries  of  people  gather  themselves  around  Plato  or 
Shakespeare  or  any  other  man  who  stands  for  some 
department  of  the  world's  culture,  and  when  they 
assume  to  themselves  superiority  over  all  the  world 
because  they  have  had  the  time  and  the  leisure  and 
the  taste  to  familiarize  themselves  with  these  things 
they  become  dilettanti,  that  are  contemptible  and 
not  to  be  honored.  As  an  illustration  of  what  I 
mean  and  how  far  it  is  sometimes  carried  :  I  was 
talking  with  one  of  the  most  prominent  and  best- 
known  men  of  Massachusetts  the  other  day  and  he 
told  me  that  a  lady  living  in  Boston  —  I  won't  say 


52  LIFE    QUESTIONS. 

what  quarter  of  it  —  was  speaking  with  a  friend  of 
his  the  other  day,  and  she  was  referring  to  the 
section  of  the  city  in  which  we,  as  she  thought,  were 
unfortunate  enough  to  live.  Speaking  of  somebody's 
proposing  to  get  up  a  Chaucer  class,  she  remarked 
superciHously :  "  A  society  to  read  Chaucer  at  the 
South  End !  As  though  there  was  anybody  at  the 
South  End  that  knew  anything  about  Chaucer  ! "  I 
speak  of  this  simply  as  illustrating  the  infinitesimally 
contemptible  quality  that  may  allay  itself  with  merely 
intellectual  culture ;  speaking  of  how  poor  and  mean 
a  thing  it  is  when  it  arrogates  its  supremacy  in 
society  above  qualities  that  are  nobler  than  itself. 
Then  society  gathers  around  merely  the  idea  of 
amusement ;  but  I  will  not  enlarge  upon  this. 

W/iat   is  Good  Society. 

And  now  let  us  raise  the  question  and  answer  it 
clearly  to  ourselves  as  to  what  constitutes  good  society. 
There  would  seem  to  be  a  great  deal  of  mysticism 
and  uncertainty  in  the  answers  to  this  question. 
Looking  abroad  over  the  world  we  see  people  striving 
here  and  striving  there  to  get  into  this  class  or  clique 
or  association  or  circle,  of  which  they  have  not  the 
entree  as  yet.  Some  think  that  this  is  good  or  that 
is  good  or  the  other  is  good,  that  they  as  yet  are  ex- 
cluded from.     What  then  is  good  society }     It  seems 


SOCIETY. 


53 


to  me  it  is  a  very  simple  thing.  What  is  a  good 
man  ?  You  do  not  need  that  I  shall  define  him. 
First,  a  man  that  has  character,  integrity — true, 
pure,  noble.  If  you  can  add  to  that  culture  and  say 
character  and  intelligence  both,  all  the  better.  The 
more  good  qualities  you  can  add  to  an  individual  the 
better.  There  is  no  mysticism  about  answering  the 
question  as  to  who  is  a  good  man.  Apply  the  same 
principle,  then,  to  society.  A  good  society  is  society 
made  up  of  good  people,  —  good  men  and  good 
women.  I  know  of  no  better  definition  than  that. 
If  having  a  skillful  tailor  and  being  gotten  up  in  the 
most  artistic  fashion  is  not  able  to  make  a  good  man, 
a  man  that  you  will  respect  and  honor  and  look  up 
to,  then  why  should  an  aggregation  of  a  hundred  or  a 
thousand  people  faultlessly  and  spotlessly  clothed  be 
able  to  constitute  good  society .-"  If  because  a  man  is 
rich  he  is  not,  therefore,  necessarily  a  good  man,  how 
does  it  happen  that  a  hundred  or  a  thousand  rich 
men,  without  regard  to  character,  are  able  to  consti- 
tute good  society  .-•  If  because  a  man's  grandfather  or 
some  far-off  ancestor  was  a  great  man,  is  not  good 
and  satisfactory  proof  that  he  is  a  good  man,  how 
does  it  happen  that  a  hundred  or  a  thousand  people 
who  had  distinguished  ancestry  are  able  to  constitute 
good  society  ?  The  principle  seems  to  me  an  exceed- 
ingly simple  one.  Good  society,  then,  is  that  which 
is  made  up  of  good  people ;    and  there  is  no  other 


54  LIFE    QUESTIONS. 

good  society  on  the  face  of  the  earth,  no  matter  what 
it  may  arrogate  to  itself  or  how  grand  may  be  its 
claims. 

T/ie  Law   of  Social  Success. 

Now  then  let  us  come  to  discuss  a  little  the  laws 
of  social  success  ;  the  relation  in  which  we  stand  to 
society.  The  principle  is  embodied  perfectly  in  the 
golden  rule  :  "  whatsoever  therefore  ye  would  that 
men  should  do  to  you,  do  ye  even  so  to  them."  The 
law  of  social  relation,  then,  is  the  law  of  giving 
and  taking  —  of  equality;  the  law  that  you  must 
in  some  way  pay  for  that  which  you  expect  to 
receive,  and  that  you  have  no  right  to  claim  some- 
thing for  nothing.  How  common  it  is  —  it  is  illus- 
trated in  almost  every  church  sociable  that  anybody 
ever  attended  anywhere  —  for  some  persons  to  take 
themselves  away  from  the  mass  of  those  that  have 
gathered  —  it  may  be  from  timidity  or  modesty,  or 
the  best  motive  in  the  world  —  to  some  out-of-the-way 
corner  or  to  sit  at  the  side  of  the  room  near  the  wall 
and  make  not  the  slightest  efforts  themselves  to  con- 
tribute to  the  welfare  and  comfort  and  joy  of  the 
evening,  but  to  simply  sit  and  wonder  why  somebody 
does  not  put  himself  out  for  their  sake,  to  make 
them  happy,  to  make  them  have  a  pleasant  evening. 
And  they  go  away  and  say  the  sociable  was  stupid, 


SOCIETY. 


55 


and  it  was,  too,  probably  ;  and  the  people,  if  they 
thought  anything  about  them,  as  they  retired  thought 
that  if  there  was  nobody  else  there  that  was  stupid, 
there  was  at  least  that  one. 

Give  and  Take. 

Think  for  a  moment  of  the  principle  that  underlies 
this.  You  like  to  have  somebody  sing  to  entertain 
you.  Somebody  else,  then,  likes  to  have  you  sing  to 
entertain  them.  You  like  to  have  someone  tell  an 
anecdote  to  make  the  evening  pass  pleasantly  ;  some- 
body else  likes  to  have  you  tell  an  anecdote.  You 
like  to  have  somebody  converse  with  you  and  thus 
make  the  evening  pass  pleasantly ;  somebody  else 
likes  to  have  you  converse  with  them.  Whatever 
you  expect,  that  you  must  endeavor  to  do.  Suppose, 
for  example,  that  we  could  have  for  once  an  ideal 
gathering  ;  not  one  single  person  present  who  had 
the  slightest  idea  of  being  selfishly  entertained  by 
the  rest,  but  all  coming  with  the  distinct  and  definite 
purpose  to  do  what  they  could  to  make  the  evening 
just  as  pleasant  as  possible  for  everybody  else.  We 
would  have  the  happiest  body  of  people  that  anybody 
ever  knew  ;  for  the  simple  reason  —  and  I  appeal  to 
your  past  experience  if  it  is  not  true  in  every  direc- 
tion —  for  the  simple  reason  that  you  never  in  your 
lives  forgot  yourselves  and  attempted  to  contribute 


56  LIFE    QUESTIONS. 


to  the  comfort  and  pleasure  of  somebody  else,  that 
you  did  not  wake  up  afterward  to  find  that  you  had 
been  happy,  or  had  passed  a  pleasant  hour  or  evening. 
This  is  the  secret  of  it  then.  You  have  no  more 
right  to  go  into  society  and  expect  to  be  entertained 
without  contributing  your  part  to  the  entertainment 
of  the  rest  than  you  have  to  go  into  a  dry  goods  store 
and  expect  a  yard  of  cloth  or  a  dress  pattern  or 
ribbon  without  paying  for  it.  You  may  not  be  able 
to  pay  so  many  things  as  the  others  ;  you  may  not  be 
able  to  pay  a  wide  range  of  scholarship,  ability  to 
converse  on  intellectual  topics  ;  you  may  not  be  able 
to  contribute  a  song  or  a  story  ;  you  may  feel  that 
you  lack  somewhat  of  beauty  or  grace,  of  many  of 
those  things  that  fit  one  for  social  pre-eminence  and 
display  ;  but  all  of  you  will  bear  witness  to  the  truth 
when  I  say  that  some  of  the  finest  contributions  that 
are  ever  made  to  the  passing  of  a  pleasant  evening 
are  those  that  come  from  the  warm  heart,  the  simple 
manners,  the  earnest  pleasant  smile  of  one  whose 
social  life  is  simply  an  expression  of  a  warm,  true 
heart,  a  tender  and  loving  nature.  I  get  tired  of  the 
literary  study  of  things  sometimes  ;  I  get  tired  even 
of  singing  sometimes  ;  I  get  tired  of  all  these  special 
arts  by  which  men  contribute  something  to  the  wel- 
fare and  entertainment  of  those  about  them  ;  but 
there  is  always  a  rest,  a  repose,  a  peace,  a  calmness, 
a  satisfaction  in  meeting  and  conversing  with  a  true 


SOCIETY. 


57 


man  or  a  true  woman  who  is  simply  that  and  nothing 
more. 

Doers  and  Grumblers. 

You  have  no  right,  then,  to  find  fault  with  any 
society  of  which  you  are  a  part,  or  on  the  outskirts  of 
which  you  are  hanging  as  no  more  than  a  fringe  ; 
you  have  no  right  to  find  fault  with  it  until  you  have 
contributed  to  the  full  what  you  can  to  make  it  what 
it  ought  to  be.  And  when  all  people  have  done  that 
there  will  be  nothing  left  to  find  fault  with.  I  have 
thought  sometimes  of  a  saying  I  heard  several  years 
ago  at  the  West,  It  applies  itself  perhaps  to  Sunday 
school  work,  to  church  work  and  to  things  where 
therje  is  something  to  be  done,  more  distinctly  and 
definitely  than  a  social  gathering,  and  yet  it  has  its 
bearing  here  ;  a  saying  that  the  world  is  divided  into 
two  parts  —  the  people  who  do  the  work  and  the 
people  who  find  fault.  I  have  very  rarely  found  that 
people  who  have  been  doing  the  best  they  can  to 
contribute  to  the  success  of  a  particular  movement 
are  disposed  to  find  fault  with  it  when  it  goes  wrong, 
because  it  reflects,  doubtless,  upon  themselves.  But 
the  people  who  sit  outside  and  want  it  made  right, 
but  will  not  touch  it,  even  with  their  little  finger, 
and  who  have  nothing  else  to  do,  they  can  be  very 
eloquent  in  finding  fault  with  the  miscarriages  of 
others.      This   works    sometimes    seriously  —  and    I 


58  LIFE    QUESTIONS. 

wish  you  would  think  of  it  —  concerning  our  Sunday 
school,  concerning  church  work,  in  every  direction. 
Before  you  find  fault  with  what  others  are  doing 
consider  whether  you  have  contributed  all  that  you 
should  toward  the  success  of  that  in  which  you  are 
engaged. 

A   Charity  Principle, 

But  while  persons  must  feel  that  it  is  their  fault  if 
they  do  not  contribute  something  to  society  and  so 
receive  something  in  return,  on  the  other  hand  there 
is  a  charity  principle,  a  beneficent  principle,  a  self- 
sacrificing  principle  that  ought  to  come  in ;  and  those 
who  have  social  ability  and  conversational  ability,  sing- 
ing ability,  power  in  any  way  to  comfort  and  entertain 
in  their  own  way  their  fellow  men,  will  feel  that  it  is 
their  business  to  pour  themselves  out  upon  those  that 
are  about  them,  as  the  sun  does  its  light  —  upon  the 
good  and  the  bad,  the  ugly  and  the  beautiful,  the  just 
and  the  unjust ;  thus  developing  and  calling  into  ac- 
tivity faculties  and  powers  on  the  part  of  others  that 
else  would  have  been  stunted  and  never  have  found 
their  development. 

Limits    of   Acquaintatice. 

As  touching  this  matter  of  the  law  of  social  suc- 
cess, there  is  one  other  thought  that  I  must  bring  in ; 


SOCIETY.  59 

and  that  is  the  gathering  of  these  social  aggregates 
that  we  find  everywhere  about  us.     I  remember  when 
I  was  in  a  church  at  the  West,  it  began  a  few  years 
before  I  went  there  as  a  little  church  of  twenty  or 
thirty  members  ;    it  was  like  a  little  family,  a  little 
household  ;  everybody  knew  everybody  else,  and  felt 
perfectly  at  home.     But  the  church  grew.     Of  course 
they  wanted  it  to  grow ;  but  they  seemed  to  be  un- 
willing: to  take  one  of  the  inevitable  results  of  this 
growth,   and  that  was  its  getting  so  large  that  they 
could  no  longer  have  the  little  family  circle  where 
everybody  would  feel  perfectly  at  home  and  familiar. 
I  hear  people  occasionally  say :  "  A  few  years  ago  I 
knew  everybody  in  the  church  ;  now  I  look  over  it 
and  it  seems  like  a  strange  audience ;  I  do  not  know 
half  of   them."     Perfectly  natural.     How  could  you 
expect   it  to  be  otherwise  ?     Think   for   a   moment 
before  you  find  fault  with  the  church  and  say  that  it 
is  not  social  and  that  it  is  not  easy  to  get  acquainted 
in.     If  there  is  any  one  lady  or  gentleman  in  this 
church  that  should  attempt  to  become  personally  ac- 
quainted with  everybody  else  in  it  they  would  have 
to  give  up  all  their  other  business  and  devote  them- 
selves exclusively    to   this.      If   you   are   not   ready 
to  pay  this  price  then  do  not  wonder  that  there  are 
people   here   that    you   do    not   know.       Remember 
that  this  principle  of  social  aggregation   is  just  as 
natural  as  the  principle  of  crystallization  in  nature. 


6o  LIFE    QUESTIONS. 

Chemical  affinities  come  in  in  the  realm  of  nature 
and  bring  certain  peculiar  kinds  of  qualities  together, 
things  that  naturally  belong  together  and  have  an 
affinity  for  each  other.  We  find  this  is  the  law 
everywhere  in  the  vegetable  world,  making  grass 
here,  a  little  shrub  there,  a  rosebush  in  another  place, 
here  an  oak,  there  an  elm  ;  we  find  each  according  to 
its  law.  And  when  we  come  into  the  realm  of  inani- 
mate nature,  we  find  it  in  the  crystals.  The  world's 
crystals  themselves,  each  after  their  own  law,  make 
themselves  into  this  infinite  variety,  each  beautiful 
after  its  kind.  Precisely  the  same  law  must  work  in 
society.  There  are  crystallizations,  little  aggregates 
of  people  that  we  call  cliques.  Is  there  anything 
wrong  about  cliques  ?  That  depends  upon  another 
question  as  to  what  kind  of  a  clique  it  is.  If  the 
people  that  get  together  into  a  little  clique  do  it  for 
some  purely  selfish  purpose,  or  gather  around  some 
principle  that  in  itself  is  evil,  then  that  is  evil.  It  is 
not  because  it  is  a  clique,  but  because  the  principle  of 
the  aggregation  is  wrong.  When  people  gather 
together  and  make  a  benevolent  society,  devoting 
themselves  to  the  work  of  helping  on  and  lifting  up 
their  fellow-men,  that  is  a  clique  ;  but  we  never  think 
of  calling  it  by  any  opprobrious  epithet;  we  honor 
and  admire  it.  You  cannot  wonder  that  people  follow 
their  own  affinities.  People  gravitate  together  and 
find  something  that  answers  to  their  own  natures  and 


SOCIETY.  6 1 


their  own  qualities ;  and  many  times  people  cannot 
give  any  account  why  they  do  it.  You  remember  the 
old  stanza : 

I  do  not  like  thee,  Doctor  Fell, 
The  reason  why  I  cannot  tell ; 
But  only  this  I  know  full  well, 
I  do  not  like  thee.  Doctor  Fell. 

That  is  simply  the  beginning  and  the  end  of  it.  You 
cannot  find  any  fault  with  this  principle ;  at  least  you 
cannot  find  any  fault  with  anybody  except  Him  who 
has  created  human  nature  and  made  it  what  it  is. 
There  is  only  one  person  left  in  the  community,  so 
far  as  I  know,  who,  according  to  the  popular  tradition 
and  expectation,  it  is  supposed  ought  to  love  every- 
body just  alike  :  and  that  is  the  minister.  But  so  far 
as  my  experience  and  observation  are  concerned, 
there  has  not  been  a  case  so  conspicuously  successful 
as  to  make  us  justified  in  believing  that  it  will  ever 
be  fully  realized.  We  cannot  help  loving  one  person 
more  than  another,  being  attracted  by  this  one, 
repelled  by  that ;  only  we  should  dominate  this  whole 
law  always  by  the  principle  of  right  and  truth  and 
justice  towards  our  fellow-men. 

Social  Obligations. 

There  is  another  point.  Have  we  any  social  obli- 
gations .-*  That  is,  here  is  a  man,  for  example,  who 
is    purely  intellectual   in   his  tastes ;    who  does  not 


62  LIFE    QUESTIONS. 


like  general  society;  who  never  wants  to  go  into 
company ;  he  will  retire  by  himself,  he  will  write  a 
book,  he  will  study,  he  will  pursue  some  selfish  aim 
of  his  own.  No  matter  what  it  is  that  takes  him 
apart  from  his  fellows,  he  chooses  to  live  by  himself. 
There  is  another  type  that  I  have  in  mind,  that  is  a 
more  beautiful  illustration  —  the  type  of  a  woman 
who  has  found  her  whole  love  in  her  family ;  who 
loves  husband  and  children  devotedly,  and  who  has 
on  the  outer  edge  of  this  family  circle  simply  a  few 
personal  friendships  that  are  so  close  that  they  may 
be  considered  a  part  of  the  family  itself ;  who  never 
makes  a  ceremonious  call ;  who  never  drives  over 
the  city  in  her  carriage,  and  is  glad  of  an  opportunity 
for  leaving  a  card  instead  of  going  through  the  disa- 
greeable formula  of  the  call  itself.  Now  have  these 
persons,  —  the  man  or  the  woman  —  who  thus  with- 
draw  themselves  from  society,  any  justification  in  so 
doing .?  Do  they  owe  anything  to  society  ?  I  must 
answer  this  yes  and  no  ;  and  I  will  try  to  make  clear 
the  distinction  I  have  in  mind.  There  is  not  a  man 
of  the  earth,  for  that  matter,  who  has  the  right  to 
withdraw  absolutely  from  their  fellows.  What  they 
have,  what  they  are,  they  owe  to  the  struggle,  the 
thought,  the  labor,  the  tears,  the  heart-aches,  the 
achievements  of  men.  Just  as  every  coral  island  lifts 
its  peaceful  surface  above  the  sea,  crowned  with 
grasses  and  flowers,  and  waving  with  trees,  because 


SOCIETY. 


uncounted  millions  have  sacrificed  themselves,  and 
left  their  remains  down  out  of  sight  to  be  taken  no 
note  of  above ;  so  this  beautiful  social  life  we  live 
to-day,  this  intellectual  life,  this  home  life,  with  all  its 
sanctity  and  its  beauty,  we  owe  to  the  fact  that  down 
out  of  sight,  reaching  away  into  the  unfathomed 
abyss  of  the  past,  have  been  the  thoughts,  the  sym- 
pathies, and  the  struggles,  and  the  cares,  and  the 
trials  of  men  our  brothers,  and  women  our  sisters, 
that  we  do  not  even  know  by  name.  This  is  the 
ground  on  which  this,  that  we  call  humanity,  has 
its  intellectual  development,  its  beautiful  homes,  as 
flowers  blossoming  from  its  central  stem.  You  have 
no  right,  then,  to  lead  a  selfish  life,  however  beautiful 
it  may  be.  But  —  and  here  let  me  be  understood 
again  —  it  may  be  that  a  man  is  so  constituted  that 
by  retiring  to  the  privacy  of  his  own  study  and 
writing  a  book,  he  may  do  for  the  world  more  than  he 
could  do  if  he  lived  always  in  the  world  and  did  not 
produce  the  work  to  which  he  devotes  his  life.  It 
may  be,  on  the  other  hand,  that  the  mother  who 
builds  a  beautiful  and  ideal  home,  a  nest  for  all  sweet 
affections  and  noble  joys,  that  she  is  thus,  by  showing 
the  possibility  of  humanity,  by  showing  what  kind  of 
a  home  can  be  created  by  devotion  and  love  —  it  may 
well  be,  T  say,  that  she  may  make  a  grander  contribu- 
tion to  the  social  life  of  the  world,  than  by  living 
always  in  society  and  neglecting  the  beautiful  labor 


64  LIFE    QUESTIONS. 

of  the  ideal  home.  For,  just  as  a  star  far  off,  belong- 
ing to  the  solar  system,  shines  down  upon  and  beau- 
tifies, and  makes  glad  the  earth,  so  home,  withdrawn 
from  society,  far  off,  above  all  the  fancy  and  glitter, 
casts  its  sweet  and  cheering  influence  and  its  inspiring 
example  over  the  whole  realm  of  society  of  which  it 
is  a  constituent  part. 

Yot^r   Contribution. 

Now,  then,  I  come  to  the  last,  and  ask  what  we  can 
do  to  contribute  to  the  welfare  and  upbuilding  of 
society.  What  contribution  can  we  make  to  its 
thought ;  how  shall  we  make  society  better ;  how 
shall  we  lift  it  up  to  make  it  worthy  of  its  possibilities  .'* 

And,  in  the  first  place,  the  first  thing  you  must  do 
is  to  be  yourself,  and  to  make  yourself  something 
noble  and  worthy  ;  make  yourself  such  a  man  or  such 
a  woman  that  when  you  go  into  society  you  shall  have 
added  to  it  something  of  value,  so  that  it  shall  be 
more  when  you  are  in  it  than  when  you  are  out 
of  it.  For,  no  matter  what  fine  speeches  a  person 
may  be  capable  of  making,  no  matter  how  graceful 
in  manner,  how  beautifully  dressed,  the  contribution 
that  you  really  do  make  to  society  is  not  primarily 
how  you  look,  not  primarily  how  you  are  dressed,  not 
primarily  the  song  you  sing  or  the  music  you  play. 
The  contribution  you  make  to  society,  whether  you 


SOCIETY.  gt; 


will  or  not,  is  primaril}'-  and  first  of  all  what  you  are ; 
and  you  cannot  help  it.  And  if  you  are  contracted, 
if  you  are  narrow,  if  you  are  prejudiced,  if  you  are 
selfish,  if  you  are  mean,  then  the  more  you  go  into 
society  the  more  you  drag  it  down.  If  you  are  noble, 
and  true,  and  pure,  then  you  lift  it  up ;  and  you 
cannot  help  these  influences,  unspoken  and  unseen, 
acting  upon  and  mingling  with  all  the  forces  that  con- 
stitute this  social  life  in  which  you  are  a  part.  Try 
to  be  something  distinct  and  definite  by  yourselves  ; 
cultivate  individuality,  in  other  words.  If  I  were 
capable  of  writing  a  poem  I  should  not  take  it  as 
much  of  a  compliment  that  somebody  said  it  had  a 
Tennysonian  ring,  or  that,  it  sounded  like  Longfellow. 
If  I  cannot  write  something  that  shall  have  my  own 
ring  and  sound  like  myself,  then  I  do  not  care  to  write 
anything  at  all.  I  would  not  care  to  be  the  shadow 
of  the  greatest  man  in  the  world.  I  would  rather 
cause  a  shadow  of  my  own,  if  it  is  ever  so  small.  If 
you  go  into  society  and  simply  make  number  fifty, 
you  have  added  nobody  to  it,  except  another  person 
to  eat  the  supper  and  be  in  the  way.  But  if  you  go 
into  society  and  add  yourself,  so  that  people  who  know 
you  feel  that  there  is  somebody  else  here  that  was  not 
here  before  you  came,  then  you  have  made  a  contri- 
bution to  society,  no  matter  especially  as  to  whether 
it  is  this  kind  or  that.  Create  a  quality  of  your  own  ; 
be  distinct ;  think  your  own  thoughts  ;  stand  on  your 

5 


56  LIFE   QUESTIONS. 


own  teet ;  speak  your  own  words,  whether  they  seem 
to  you  as  fine  or  as  noble  as  those  of  others  or  not. 
The  hope  of  this  world  is  in  the  individuality  of  the 
members  of  which  it  is  comjDOsed.  I  would  not  like 
to  have  all  the  flowers  of  the  world  roses  even  if  they 
were  ever  so  beautiful.  I  would  have  variety,  I  would 
have  even  those  things  by  the. roadside  that,  because 
we  have  not  learned  how  beautiful  they  are,  we  still 
call  weeds.  I  would  rather  have  them  now  and  then 
if  I  wished  to  make  a  bouquet.  So  add  your  own 
distinct  and  definite  contributions  to  society. 

Men  and   Women. 

And  now  I  have  a  word  or  two  that  I  wish  to  say 
concerning  one  or  two  of  the  aspects  that  society  takes 
on  and  the  influences  which  men  and  women  exert. 
Men  have  immense  power  to  tone  up  and  elevate  the 
society  of  which  they  are  a  part,  and  to  make  it  tend 
toward  the  highest  and  best  things  in  the  women  that 
constitute  the  other  half  of  society.  So  long  as  men 
and  women  are  constituted  as  they  are  it  will  always 
be  one  of  the  first  thoughts  in  their  minds,  and  it  is 
right  that  it  should  be,  as  to  whether  they  are  pleas- 
ing to  the  other  half  of  society.  It  is  perfectly  right 
and  inevitable  that  men  should  desire  to  please  women 
and  that  women  should  desire  to  please  men.  There 
could  be  no  society  otherwise.     Out  of  this  springs 


SOCIETT. 


67 


all  that  is  most  beautitul  and  gracious  in  society. 
And  now,  what  do  I  mean  by  that?  Where  comes 
in  the  power  with  men  ?  We  find  a  great  deal  of 
fault  privately,  in  magazine  articles  and  in  newspapers 
because  women  spend  so  much  time  in  the  mere  mat- 
ter of  looks  and  dress.  Whose  fault  is  it  that  they 
do  ?  Primarily,  the  fault  of  men.  Just  so  long  as 
a  beautiful  dress  counts  more  in  society  than  anything 
else,  just  so  long  as  men  court  the  beautiful  face, 
though  it  be  only  as  Tennyson  expresses  it  concern- 
ing Maud  —  "  icily  regular,  splendidly  null "  —  so  long, 
I  say,  as  a  woman  possessing  merely  fine  clothes  and  a 
beautiful  face,  finds  that  she  is  able  by  either  of  these 
characteristics  to  be  queen  of  society,  to  bring  men 
to  follow  her  as  moths  gather  about  a  candle,  even 
to  bring  them  to  her  feet,  just  so  long  will  women  pay 
deference  to  these  qualities  and  will  lay  their  emphasis 
upon  them,  and  you  cannot  wonder.  Just  so  long  as 
society  demands  that  when  a  woman  is  married  all 
the  articles  of  her  trousseau  shall  be  displayed  for  the 
entertainment  of  the  ladies  of  her  acquaintance,  so 
long  as  they  care  more  about  her  many  dresses  and 
the  cut  of  her  train  than  they  care  about  her  heart  or 
her  brain,  just  so  long  will  women  emphasize  face  and 
dress.  Those  qualities  which  give  power,  success, 
mastery,  are  the  ones  on  which  the  emphasis  is  laid 
by  both  men  and  women.  It  is  perfectly  natural  and 
inevitable  that  it  should  be  so.     So  soon  as  men  show 


68  LIFE   QUESTIONS. 

a  higher  cultivation  of  their  own  higher  tastes  so  that 
they  can  see  heart  and  character  in  a  plain  face,  so 
that  they  can  see  grace  and  life  and  thought  and  heart 
although  it  be  not  decked  and  ornamented  to  excess, 
then  these  higher  qualities  will  come  to  the  front.  It 
is  the  inevitable  law  of  natural  selection  ;  these  things 
come  to  the  front  and  display  themselves  because 
they  have  the  right  of  control  in  them.  It  is  man's 
fault,  then,  and  not  woman's  chiefly  or  primarily  that 
women  lay  the  emphasis  on  these  merely  external 
and  superficial  things.  You  all  know  what  power  a 
beautiful  character  and  life  has  to  sculpture  the  face. 
Some  of  the  very  plainest  looking  faces  I  have  ever 
seen,  and  some  of  the  plainest  dresses,  I  have  sat 
before  and  bowed  down  to,  looking  into  the  eye  and 
listening  to  the  voice  until  everything  except  the 
womanly  heart  and  the  cultivated  brain  were  forgot- 
ten. Emphasize  these  things,  then,  make  them  of 
worth  in  the  social  market  and  they  will  be  brought 
to  market. 

Women  atid  Men. 

Now,  on  the  other  side,  society  will  not  be  pure, 
noble  and  true  as  it  ought  to  be  until  women  are 
more  inexorable  than  they  are  as  yet  in  the  demands 
they  make  upon  men.  If  a  man  feels  that  it  is  dis- 
reputable for  him  to  associate  with  a  criminal  woman, 
why  should  not  a  woman  feel  the  same  of  a  criminal 


SOCIETY. 


69 


man  ?  Until  this  law  cuts  clear  down  through,  and  is 
equal  in  its  reach  and  power,  there  will  be  no  redemp- 
tion of  society.  How  is  it  now  ?  I  appeal  to  you  if 
I  have  not  the  right  to  say  that  if  a  man  has  a  fine 
figure,  is  good-looking,  has  a  pleasing  address,  if  he 
has  money,  if  he  has  social  standing,  the  chances  are 
a  hundred  to  one,  that  he  can  go  into  almost  any 
home  and  pluck  the  fairest,  the  sweetest,  the  purest 
flower  of  the  family,  although  he  be  rotten  from 
centre  to  circumference  and  from  head  to  foot  ?  So- 
ciety will  not  be  what  it  ought  to  be  until  this  is  at 
an  end.  There  is  one  thing  to  be  said  in  excuse  for 
it.  The  power  that  succeeds  in  society  is  the  power 
that  can  please.  A  man  who  has  no  fear,  who  is  self- 
possessed,  has  a  pleasant  address,  is  of  course  able  to 
please  socially;  so  far  it  is  perfectly  legitimate  and 
right.  But  there  are  men,  thank  God,  by  the  thousand 
in  the  world  yet  who  have  this  and  something  more ; 
and  this  something  more  must  be  emphasized  before 
it  will  be  developed.  If  a  man  who  steps  over  the 
line  of  right  were  ostracised  as  a  woman  is,  there 
would  be  a  revolution  in  society  in  twenty  years. 

Now,  one  last  thought,  for  my  time  has  gone. 
Society  gathers  itself  around  all  sorts  of  centres,  from 
the  lowest  to  the  highest.  It  may  gather  itself  around 
the  principle  of  simple  amusement.  That  is  all  right 
as  far  as  it  goes.  If  it  be  no  higher  than  the  "light 
fantastic  toe,"  if  that  be  the  ultimate  end  and  aim  of  it 


70  LIFE    QUESTIONS. 

all,  within  proper  limits,  and  circumscribed  as  it  ought 
to  be,  that  is  perfectly  right.  But  the  heart  is  higher 
than  that.  Seek  to  bring  into  your  social  gatherings 
the  affectional  element  and  you  have  elevated  it  a 
degree ;  bring  into  it  cultivation  and  thought  and  you 
have  elevated  it  another  degree ;  bring  into  it  char- 
acter and  make  that  supreme  and  you  have  made 
society  not  only  the  result  of  nobility,  and  devotion, 
and  morality,  and  religion,  but  you  have  made  it  the 
mightiest  power  to  create,  to  lift  up  and  to  regener- 
ate the  world. 


HOW  MUCH  MUST  I  WORK  AND  HOW  MUCH  MAY  I  PLAY? 


Worki7tg  and  Playing, 

Perhaps  it  is  hardly  worth  while  for  me  to  take  the 
trouble  to  define  what  we  mean  by  working  and  by 
playing.  There  is  not  a  boy,  or  a  girl,  who  practically 
does  not  understand  completely  what  the  distinction 
is.  And  yet,  if  we  choose  to  analyze  them  for  just  a 
moment,  so  that  we  may  see  what  we  really  mean,  we 
shall  find,  I  think,  that  the  distinction  between  work- 
ing and  playing  is  not  a  distinction  in  the  thing  done, 
nor  in  the  way  of  doing  it.  It  is  rather  a  mental  or 
an  emotional  distinction  ;  that  is,  a  boy  on  a  coasting 
expedition,  sliding  down  hill  and  then  hauling  his  sled 
up  again  after  him,  may  be  putting  forth  much  more 
physical  effort,  really  exerting  himself  much  harder, 
than  he  would  be  in  performing  some  task  that  has 
been  set  him  by  parent  or  teacher.  But  he  knows 
perfectly  well  that  the  one  is  play  and  the  other  is 
work.  If  he  were  set  to  sliding  down  hill  and  hauling 
the  sled  up  again  after  him  as  a  task,  when  he  did  not 


72 


LIFE    QUESTIONS. 


want  to  be  engaged  in  that,  but  wanted  to  be  doing 
something  else,  precisely  the  same  thing  which  would 
be  play  under  one  set  of  circumstances  becomes  work 
in  another.  The  distinction,  then,  I  say,  is  not  in  the 
thing  done ;  it  is  not  in  the  amount  of  effort  expended. 
A  prominent  writer  and  very  subtle  thinker  has  given 
a  definition  like  this ;  he  says  that  work  is  effort  ex- 
pended for  some  ulterior  object,  while  play  is  some- 
thing that  you  do  just  for  the  sake  of  doing  it.  This 
is  true  within  certain  limits ;  but  if  I  had  time,  and  it 
were  worth  while,  I  should  be  able  to  point  out  to  you 
some  important  exceptions.  I  only  care,  however, 
to  note  this  as  a  matter  of  thought  for  you,  and  to 
pass  on. 

Mans  Nature. 

In  order  to  find  out  what  a  man  or  woman  ought 
to  do,  to  find  out  what  any  being  in  heaven  above  or 
in  the  earth  beneath  ought  to  do,  is  a  very  simple 
matter  so  far  as  its  essential  principles  are  concerned. 
We  are  to  find  out  what  this  being  is ;  the  law  of  its 
nature  ;  and  then  we  are  to  find  out  the  circumstances 
in  which  it  is  placed ;  the  relations  in  which  it  stands. 
Every  one  knows  at  once,  on  glancing  at  a  fish,  that 
its  life  is  to  be  in  the  water ;  it  is  adapted  to  that  life ; 
it  is  living  out  the  law  of  its  nature  by  following  it. 
We  know  when  we  glance  at  a  bird  that  its  life  is  to 
be  quite  other  than  that  of  the  fish ;  it  is  adapted  to 


WORK  AND  PLAT. 


73 


another  element,  and  if  compelled  to  follow  the  life 
of  a  fish  it  would  follow  it  but  for  a  moment  before  it 
would  cease  to  be.  And  so  we  may  take  any  of  the 
animals,  or  birds,  or  fishes,  any  creature  that  belongs 
to  the  lower  life  of  the  world,  and  we  shall  find  that 
the  same  principle  will  hold.  Now  when  we  come  up 
to  man  what  do  we  find  ?  We  find  that  he  shares  a 
part  of  his  nature  with  the  fish,  a  part  of  his  nature 
with  the  bird,  a  part  of  his  nature  with  the  wild 
animal  of  the  forest,  a  part  of  his  nature  with  the 
butterfly  that  only  flits  from  flower  to  flower.  But 
man  has  no  right  to  be  a  tiger  because  there  are 
uneliminated  elements  of  the  tiger  in  him  ;  a  man  has 
no  right  to  lead  the  life  of  a  butterfly  because  there 
are  about  him  and  in  his  nature  as  yet  some  of  the 
elements  of  the  life  that  the  butterfly  leads ;  for  the 
simple  reason  that  he  has  other  things,  higher  things, 
faculties  and  powers  that  are  capable  of  making  some- 
thing more,  something  broader,  something  deeper, 
something  higher  than  the  nature  of  any  or  all 
these.  The  law  of  man's  life,  then,  is  to  be  deter- 
mined by  finding  out  what  sort  of  a  being  he  is,  what 
he  is  capable  of  being,  and  what  be  is  capable  of 
becoming.  And  if  we  look  for  a  solution  to  these 
questions  we  shall  find  that  if  not  the  law — for  I 
shall  hardly  say  that  —  we  shall  find  at  any  rate  that 
a  law,  and  one  of  the  most  important  laws  of  nature, 
is  the  law  of  labor.     Man  is  man  only  by  virtue  of 


74  LIFE  QUESTIONS. 


labor  expended.     Let  us  look  at  this  in  two  or  three 
directions. 

Labor  and  Growth. 

In  the  first  place,  if  you  take  him  simply  as  an 
individual,  look  at  the  faculties  of  which  he  is  com- 
posed. Begin  with  muscle,  if  you  please.  How  does 
a  man  develop .''  What  is  the  difference  between  a 
little  child  that  as  yet  cannot  walk,  that  does  not 
know  the  use  of  its  hands,  that  has  not  learned  the 
use  of  its  eyes,  that  has  not  learned  the  use  of  its 
feet  —  what  is  the  difference  between  a  child  like 
this  and  a  full-grown  man }  Primarily  that  which 
makes  the  difference  is  the  effort  that  has  been 
expended  by  the  developing  and  the  awakening  of 
the  faculties  and  powers  of  the  child,  through  which 
effort,  and  by  means  of  which,  the  child  has  de- 
veloped and  grown  to  be  a  man.  It  is  work  that 
develops  a  man's  arm  ;  it  is  work  also  that  develops 
a  man's  brain,  that  makes  the  artist,  that  makes  the 
musician,  that  makes  the  author,  that  makes  the 
philanthropist,  that  makes  what  we  call  a  man  in 
any  and  every  department  of  human  life.  Work, 
then,  is  the  law  of  development  of  every  one  of 
our  faculties  and  powers.  The  difference  between 
the  uneducated  man  and  an  educated  one  is  simply 
work.     And  even  genius  itself,  that  supreme  faculty 


WORK  AND  PLAT. 


7S 


and  power  which  is  supposed  to  make  its  possessors 
in  some  sense  distinguished  from  all  of  their  kind  ; 
one  of  the  most  marked  geniuses  of  the  world  has 
said,  even  concerning  this,  that  genius  is  chiefly  the 
faculty  of  hard  work ;  and  those  productions  of 
genius  that  we  suppose  are  flashed  off  in  a  moment 
of  inspiration,  represent  years  of  thought  and  toil, 
and  even  agonizing  struggle.  Take  as  one  typical 
illustration  the  magnificent  poem  of  Faust,  the 
greatest  creative  work  of  genius  probably  since 
Shakespeare.  Goethe  began  this  poem,  dreamed 
about  it,  outlined  it  when  he  was  a  young  man,  and 
wrote  parts  of  it.  He  finished  it  only  when  he  was 
an  old  man.  That  is,  this  poem  is  the  quintessence, 
the  outflowering  of  all  the  magnificent  life,  all  the 
effort  of  genius  of  him  who  was,  perhaps,  the  greatest 
man  of  the  modern  world.  Work,  then,  represents 
the  development  of  the  individual. 

Work  and  Civilization. 

And  then  when  we  raise  the  question  as  to  what 
claims  to  be  civilization,  what  will  be  the  answer } 
Civilization  is  nothing  less  than  transformed  and 
crystallized  labor.  Look  at  the  city  of  Boston. 
Travel  over  the  miles  and  miles  of  our  pavement  and 
think  of  the  amount  of  work  that  has  transformed 
the  wild  country  that  this  was  before  the   Indians 


76  LIFE  QUESTIONS. 


were  driven  to  the  West  into  the  populous  streets  of 
our  great  city.  Look  at  our  magnificent  buildings 
and  think  until  you  are  weary,  of  laying  brick  upon 
brick,  and  carving  out  carefully,  day  after  day,  the 
stones  that  at  last  are  lifted  and  fitted  into  the  walls 
of  our  great  structures.  Think  of  the  work  repre- 
sented simply  by  the  external  life  of  a  great  city  like 
Boston  ;  and  then  remember  that  this  is  only  one  of 
hundreds  and  thousands  that  the  labor,  the  toil,  the 
effort  of  man  has  lifted  up  all  over  the  world.  When 
you  get  inside  of  the  buildings,  then  what }  Go  into 
one  of  the  school -houses  ;  open  a  grammar  or  a  text 
book  on  geology  or  astronomy.  It  is  a  very  simple 
thing  ;  you  can  buy  it,  perhaps,  for  half  a  dollar  or  a 
dollar.  Children  learn  it  in  a  very  little  while.  But 
these  simple  formulas,  and  propositions,  and  state- 
ments of  fact  that  are  given  to  us  to-day,  they 
represent  thousands  of  years  of  toil,  and  struggle, 
and  effort,  and  tears,  and  persecution,  and  outlawry, 
and  death  on  the  part  of  our  fellow  men.  Civilization, 
then,  is  simply  a  gigantic  monument  erected  by  and 
to  the  gigantic  effort  and  toil  of  men. 

Work  and  Duty. 

And  then  in  another  direction  see  how  this  law 
appeals  to  us.  If  a  man  have  in  him  the  heart  of  a 
man,  if  he  have  in  him  a  sympathy  that  reaches  out 


WOBK  AND  PLAY. 


77 


and  takes  hold  of,  and  feels  with  the  sorrows,  and 
trials,  and  troubles  of  his  fellow-men,  if  he  be  not 
deaf  in  the  very  highest  department  of  his  nature,  he 
must  feel  the  necessity  and  hear  the  call  from  every 
quarter,  the  call  incessant,  the  cry  that  wails  forth 
its  moan  from  morning  till  night,  and  through  what 
we  call  the  still  hours,  even  sends  up  its  moan  of 
desire,  its  mourning,  its  appeal  to  heaven  and  out 
towards  man.  The  want  of  the  world ;  the  suffering 
bodily;  not  only  that  —  mentally;  the  heart  struggles, 
the  tragedies  of  life  that  grow  out  of  the  fact  that 
man  is  only  partially  civilized,  that  he  has  only  half 
learned  to  adjust  himself  to  the  relations  in  which  he 
stands  to  his  fellows.  And  then  the  crimes,  and  kin 
to  these,  weakness  as  yet  not  grown  strong,  that 
mean  ignorance,  that  mean  stress  of  temptation,  that 
mean  weakness  trampled  down  by  the  crowd. 

And  then  higher  yet,  in  man's  spiritual  nature 
there  is  a  want,  this  grand  uncompleted  ideal  of 
humanity  that  is  not  ^s  yet  in  our  life,  a  constant 
cry  and  appeal  to  his  fellow  for  love.  So  that,  I  say, 
by  as  much  as  a  man  is  a  man,  by  as  much  as  a 
woman  is  a  woman,  noble  and  true,  by  so  much  must 
man  and  woman  both  feel  this  everlasting  call  to 
labor,  to  live,  to  do  something,  to  cheer  one's  fellows, 
to  lift  them  up  and  to  help  them  on.  It  seems  to  me 
if  we  will  only  stand  for  a  little  and  think  of  what  we 
owe  to  the  world,  of  how  much  the  past  has  wrought 


78  LJFE  QUESTIONS. 

out  for  us  and  how  all  the  blossoming  beauty  of  our 
civilization  represents  the  soil  watered  by  tears  and 
blood,  a  rugged  soil  tamed  by  age-long  effort  on  the 
part  of  our  brothers  and  sisters  —  I  say,  if  we  will 
stop  and  think  of  this,  we  can  never,  for  one  moment, 
think  of  doubting  the  everlasting  law  of  labor  that  is 
laid  upon  us ;  the  necessity  to  do  what  we  can  to 
make  the  world  easier,  not  only  for  those  that  are 
about  us  to-day,  but  to  save  our  children  and  our 
neighbors'  children  from  the  toil  and  from  the  strug- 
gle that  has  been  needed  to  lift  up  life  to  its  present 
condition.  It  seems  to  me,  if  one  declines  to  do  his 
part,  that  he  is  like  one  who  should  stand  among  the 
graves  of  the  national  cemetery  at  Gettysburg,  and 
remembering  that  he  owes  his  country  to  those  that 
sleep,  —  turning  to  dust  underneath  in  the  shapeless 
mounds,  —  should  yet  be  capable  of  betraying  the 
country  they  thus  have  purchased  for  him.  He  who 
does  not  recognize  the  law  of  labor  that  binds  him  to 
his  fellow  and  makes  it  a  part  of  the  first  moral  dut) 
of  his  life  to  do  something  to  help  on  the  world, 
seems  to  me  to  be  a  traitor  to  his  kind. 

How  much  Labor? 

The  law  of  labor,  then,  is  so  inexorable  as  this. 
But  when  we  raise  the  question  embodied  in  our 
topic.  How  much  shall  I  labor,  how  much  shall   I 


O 


WOBK  AND  PLAT. 


79 


work  ?  I  can  give  you  no  hard  and  fast  definition  or 
answer.  Remember  the  principle  and  you  will  not 
go  far  astray.  And  I  cannot  give  you  that  principle 
in  any  shorter  words  than  by  quoting  to  you  that  old 
phrase  that  has  become  proverbial,  noblesse  oblige  — 
ability  is  obligation.  That  is,  you  are  under  obliga- 
tion to  do  for  the  world  what  you  can.  How  much 
that  is  you  yourself  must  decide.  There  ought  to  be 
here  no  room  for  discouragement  or  depression,  if,  as 
Milton  said,  with  such  profound  truth  in  that  famous 
sonnet  of  his  on  his  blindness, 

They'  also  serve  who  only  stand  and  wait. 

If  Standing  and  waiting  is  all  you  can,  then  you 
serve  your  fellow  men  by  standing  and  waiting. 
How  many  a  time  perhaps,  we  find  ourselves  at  the 
opening  of  pathways  leading  this  way  and  leading 
that,  when  we  may  feel  obliged  to  hesitate  and  wait 
weeks  and  months,  sometimes  years,  before  we  can 
answer  the  question  as  to  what  our  life  means.  But 
beware  that  it  is  turned  not  into  idleness.  Remem- 
ber that  something  in  the  world  is  given  to  every 
man  and  every  woman  to  do ;  something  that  bears 
some  relation  to  your  fellow  men ;  and  earnestly  and 
diligently  seek  to  find  what  that  something  is,  and 
then  earnestly  and  diligently  seek  to  perform  it. 
This  is  the  law  then.  You  are  under  obligation  to 
work  what  you  can.     This  depends,  of  course,  upon 


8o  I^IFE    QUESTIONS. 

health ;  it  depends  upon  natural  ability ;  it  depends 
upon  circumstances ;  it  depends  upon  a  hundred 
things  that  no  one  else  can  lay  down  for  you  as  rules 
or  foretell.  But  you  yourself,  with  conscience  for 
a  guide,  with  the  love  of  God  in  your  heart  and 
the  love  of  your  fellow  men,  need  not  go  astray 
practically  in  seeking  to  solve  the  question. 

P/aj/  ill  NaUire. 

But  is  work  all  of  life  ?  As  we  look  over  the  face 
of  nature  we  are  impressed  everywhere  by  traces  of 
the  playfulness,  the  beauty,  and  simple  joy  of  the 
universe.  We  know,  if  we  stop  to  think,  that  every- 
thing is  moving  on  under  the  control  of  inexorable 
forces  ;  that  the  position  of  a  cloudlet,  for  example, 
over  our  heads  to-day,  is  determined  by  a  chain  of 
causes  reaching  back  to  infinitude  ;  that  everything 
is  linked  together  thus,  and  that  all  things  work 
together,  as  Jesus  said  concerning  God,  "  My  Father 
worketh  hitherto,"  has  worked  always,  is  working 
to-day,  is  engaged  in  his  creation,  building  up  the 
world,  building  up  man,  just  as  much  and  in  precisely 
the  same  way  as  He  has  ever  been.  And  yet,  as 
in  the  spring,  we  lie  on  the  grass  under  the  trees, 
and  watch  the  clouds  float  across  the  blue,  there 
seems  rest  and  play  on  the  ground,  and  in  the  sky; 
and  thus  the  heart  of  nature  seems  to  speak  to  us, 


WOBK   AND   PLAY.  3 1 

and  the  leaves  seem  playing  with  the  wind,  without 
thought  of  work,  or  trouble,  or  sorrow.  We  speak  of 
the  waves  playing  upon  the  sea-shore,  and  the  sun- 
light playing  upon  the  hill-tops,  and  the  beautiful 
patter  of  the  summer  rain.  All  these  things  simply 
indicate  that  there  is  in  nature  a  certain  play  element 
that  rejoices  in  the  world  all  about  us. 

P/ay  ill  Man. 

And  then  when  we  look  at  man  what  do  we  find .-' 
We  find  not  only  the  law  of  work,  but  I  believe  just 
as  inexorable,  just  as  necessary,  just  as  far-reaching, 
the  law  of  play.  Is  it  natural.?  Why,  the  first  sign 
of  life  almost,  the  first  sign  of  intelligence,  at  any 
rate,  that  you  look  for  in  the  face  of  the  new-born 
babe,  is  a  smile ;  and  the  child's  nature  unfolds  in 
play  at  every  step.  And  we  find  as  we  study  human- 
ity, that  from  the  beginning  of  the  world,  man  has 
been  a  creature  that  has  loved  to  amuse  himself,  that 
has  loved  to  play  just  as  much  as  he  has  loved  to 
work.  And  what  does  this  mean .?  What  is  the 
principle  .-'  Anywhere,  all  over  the  world,  where  you 
find  the  work  of  man,  anything  that  he  has  done,  no 
matter  what  it  is,  whether  it  is  good,  bad  or  indiffer- 
ent, whether  it  is  beautiful  or  ugly,  wherever  you 
find  the  work  of  humanity,  you  find  simply  the 
external  expression  of  something  that  is  in  man. 
6 


82  LIFE  QUESTIONS. 


For  example,  the  church  illustrates  the  religiousness 
of  man ;  the  schoolhouse  expresses  his  intellectual 
nature.  Everything  that  you  find  expresses  some- 
thing external  that  is  in  man,  and  a  part  of  him  by 
nature.  So  the  theatre,  for  example,  expresses  some- 
thing native  and  natural  in  man,  or  else  it  would  not 
have  lived  all  these  years  and  ages. 

P/ay  and  Puritanism. 

But  because  man  is  naturally  inclined  to  play,  per- 
haps you  will  not  therefore  concede  that  this  natural 
impulse  is  right ;  at  any  rate  there  is  a  large  amount 
of  feeling  in  the  community  still,  that  tends  to  con- 
demn this  play-instinct,  and  play-element,  of  men. 
As  it  exists  here  in  Boston  to-day,  for  example  —  and 
instead  of  going  all  over  the  world,  I  will  get  my 
illustrations  from  home — as  it  exists  here  in  Boston 
to-day,  it  is  a  remnant  and  tradition  of  the  old  Puri- 
tanism that  settled  New  England.  One  of  the 
fundamental  principles  of  Puritanism  seems  to  have 
been  a  condemnation  of  amusements,  as  such  ;  looking 
upon  it  as  evil,  as  essentially  evil  and  wrong,  some- 
thing not  to  be  developed,  to  be  trained,  to  be  guided  ; 
but  something  to  be  crushed  out.  They  have  carried 
this  so  far  that  many  of  you  can  remember  illustra- 
tions from  your  own  homes,  of  how  father  and  mother 
looked  upon  anything  that  seemed  frivolous  and  light 


WORK  AND  PLAT.  S$ 

in  your  characters  as  an  evil  to  be  pruned  off,  or 
crushed  out,  frowned  upon,  treated  as  though  it  were 
the  creeping  in  of  the  serpent  into  the  garden  of  God 
once  more,  bringing  of  necessity  its  trail  of  evil  with 
it.  This  principle  was  carried  so  far  in  England,  that 
it  has  become  the  subject  of  taunt  or  ridicule.  You 
will  remember  the  saying  of  Mr.  Macauley  in  his 
essay  on  Puritanism,  where  he  says  the  Puritans 
opposed  and  fought  against  bear  baiting,  not  so  much 
because  it  hurt  the  bears,  as  because  it  gave  the 
people  amusement.  This  illustrates  the  extent  to 
which  this  principle  of  opposition  to  human  nature 
has  been  carried.  Puritanism  fought  against  play,  as 
play ;  against  amusement,  as  amusement ;  because 
there  was  a  devout  and  stern  side  of  life.  But  this 
was  not  a  new  birth  in  Puritanism.  It  has  sprung 
out  of  one  of  the  most  wide -spread  philosophical 
theories  of  the  world  that  I  wish  just  to  call  your 
attention  to,  so  that  you  may  trace  it.  The  old  doc- 
trine of  dualism,  of  monasticism  —  it  has  been  called 
by  many  names  —  the  doctrine  that  the  universe  is 
divided  in  halves,  one  half  good,  and  one  half  bad  ; 
one  half  the  work  of  the  good  God,  the  other  half  the 
work  of  a  bad  God.  And  the  amusements,  the 
passions,  the  pleasures  of  life,  have  been  extensively 
held  to  be  the  work  of  this  bad  God.  The  whole 
body  was  supposed  to  have  been  created  by  him. 
The  material  world  was  the  work  of  an  evil  principle, 


84  LIFE    QUESTIONS. 

entrapping  and  ensnaring  the  soul,  entangling  it  in 
the  meshes  of  its  materialism  that  it  might  lead  it 
astray,  pervert  it  and  keep  it  from  ascending  to  its 
true  source,  the  Father  in  the  skies.  This  has  been, 
I  say,  one  of  the  old  philosophies  of  the  world.  Out 
of  this  kind  of  philosophy,  as  a  protest  against  the 
extremes  in  the  other  direction,  sprung  the  monastic 
aspect  of  the  church. 

And  let  me  say  here,  we  have  not  done  with  Puri- 
tanism and  monasticism.  We  have  not  done  with  this 
grand,  stern,  arduous  principle  when  we  have  simply 
ridiculed  or  denounced  it.  I  believe  it  has  no  meaning 
at  the  present  time  in  Boston,  or  has  very  little  mean- 
ing, because  it  is  the  relic  of  something  that  was  once 
grand,  that  once  had  purpose  in  it,  but  which  is  now 
in  a  great  measure  outgrown,  having  no  vital  relation 
to  the  world.  There  was  a  grand  meaning  in  Puri- 
tanism when  it  stood  up  firmly  to  fight  against  the 
licentiousness  of  King  Charles'  Court ;  there  was  a 
grand  meaning  in  monasticism,  when  it  stood  up  and 
hurled  its  anathemas  at  the  amphitheatre  and  gladiato- 
rial shows  and  habits  of  licentiousness  of  the  depraved 
and  sinking  civilization  of  Rome.  But  these  were 
special  uprisings  of  this  grand  instinct  of  man  to 
meet  special  occasions,  and  they  do  not  represent 
that  which  is  permanent  in  human  nature.  This 
play-element  of  man  is  a  perfectly  natural  element ; 
and  the  expression  of  it  in  outside  means  for  amuse- 


WORK  AND  PLAY. 


85 


ment  is  perfectly  natural  and  perfectly  right.  We 
find  this  confirmed  when  we  consider  that  even  to 
the  carrying  on  successfully  of  the  grand  work  of  life 
there  must  be  mingled  with  it  play.  It  is  so  trite  a 
truth  that  I  need  only  to  refer  to  it,  that  if  you  keep 
a  muscle  tense  and  strong  for  any  length  of  time  it 
becomes  so  weary  as  to  be  utterly  incapable  of  exert- 
ing itself  even  in  work;  just  precisely  as  the  string 
of  a  musical  instrument  strained  and  held  too  long 
becomes  incapable  of  expressing  itself  in  music. 
There  must  be  relaxation,  there  must  be  recuperation, 
there  must  be  a  place  for  the  joyous  and  bright  side 
of  life  before  even  the  work  of  life  can  be  properly 
performed. 

T/ie  Underlying  Principle. 

We  find,  then,  the  principle  that  underlies  the 
whole  thing,  I  think,  when  we  give  utterance  to  this 
saying  that  there  is  nothing  in  the  universe  — 
perhaps  you  will  hardly  believe  me  at  first,  but  I 
wish  you  to  think  of  it  and  see  if  it  is  not  true  — 
there  is  nothing  in  the  universe  that  is  wrong  of 
itself.  Is  killing  a  man  wrong  .-'  That  depends  upon 
circumstances.  It  may  be  murder,  it  may  be  hero- 
ism. And  so  it  makes  no  difference  what  direction 
you  turn  to,  you  will  find  that  the  principle  will  hold. 
There  is  nothing  wrong  in  itself ;  so,  of  course,  there 
is  no  amusement  that  is  wrong  in  itself.     There  are 


86  LIFE    QUESTIONS. 

only  two  ways  of  doing  wrong.  You  can  do  wrong 
either  by  perverting  faculties  that  are  perfectly  right 
in  their  natural  or  normal  use ;  or  you  can  do  wrong 
by  excess  in  any  direction.  These  two  ways,  so  far 
as  my  thought  has  led  me,  I  believe  exhaust  the 
whole  question  of  doing  wrong.  You  can  do  wrong 
in  either  of  two  ways,  either  by  perversion  or  excess ; 
and  there  is  no  possibility  of  doing  wrong  in  any 
other  way.  The  play  principle  is  right,  and  it  is 
founded  in  nature. 

How  much  Play  ? 

Now,  then,  how  much  shall  I  play,  how  much  may 
I  play .''  What  is  the  law  that  shall  govern  us  in  this 
as  a  practical  matter }  In  the  first  place,  if  what  I 
have  said  already  is  true,  you  have  no  right,  as  some 
do,  to  play  all  the  time.  We  cannot  help  having,  I 
think,  utter  contempt  for  that  man  or  that  woman 
who  simply  goes  through  the  world  looking  after 
something  in  the  way  of  amusement.  A  man  edu- 
cated, a  man  with  money  and  means,  who  simply 
withdraws  into  himself,  or  else  travels  over  the  world 
to  find  something  that  shall  please  him  and  make 
him  happy  —  I  do  not  care  if  you  exalt  it  ever  so 
highly  —  if  a  man  devotes  himself  to  art,  to  literature 
or  to  anything  else ;  if  he  has  no  thought  or  care  for 
his  fellow  men,  if  he  is  simply  amusing  himself  in  it, 
that  man  is  contemptible ;  he  is  only  raised  a  little 


WORK  AND  PLAT. 


S? 


above  the  other  man  who  hangs  around  a  corner 
grocery,  hoping  that  somebody  will  invite  him  in 
to  take  a  drink.  In  both  cases  the  man  is  simply 
trying  to  please  himself,  leading  an  aimless  and 
useless  life.  There  are  many  that  think  themselves 
excluded  from  any  law  of  obligation  if  they  are  not 
engaged  in  something  that  is  gross  and  that  is 
frowned  upon  by  society ;  but  a  life  that  is  simply 
play,  simply  amusement,  is  condemned  by  the  law  of 
human  nature  and  the  relation  in  which  we  stand  to 
the  needs  and  wants  of  our  fellow  men.  The  woman 
in  society  who  simply  leads  a  butterfly  existence  is 
condemned  by  the  same  principle.  But  I  have  not 
yet  answered  how  much.  The  principle,  it  seems  to 
me,  is  embodied  in  one  word.  You  have  the  right  to 
use  amusement  as  recreation.  Analyze  that  word 
and  see  what  it  means.  Recreation,  to  create  over 
gain ;  to  renovate ;  to  enliven  and  build  up  the 
system  again  when  it  has  been  exhausted.  You 
have  the  right  not  only,  but  you  have  the  duty,  I 
believe,  to  amuse  yourself  to  the  extent  of  recreation. 

Work  as  Dissipation. 

But  while  I  have  said  as  hard  things  as  I  have  con 
cerning  the  question  of  always  playing,  I  am  not  at 
all  sure  but  that  there  ought  to  be  just  as  hard  things 
said  on  the  other  side.     While  there  are  some  that 


88  LIFE  QUESTIONS. 


lead  this  useless,  aimless  kind  of  life,  there  are  hun- 
dreds and  thousands,  particularly  in  our  New  England 
life,  that  exhaust  themselves  and  throw  away  the  best 
part  of  their  life,  that  practically  commit  suicide  by 
neglecting  the  law  of  recreation.  You  have  no  more 
right  to  overwork  yourself  than  you  have  to  overplay 
yourself — neither  work  nor  play  is  the  end  of  life. 
The  thing  towards  which  we  are  aiming  as  a  result  is 
both  the  development  of  yourself  and  of  the  world; 
and  you  are  under  the  highest  possible  obligation  to 
use  both  work  and  play  so  as  to  help  on  this  grand 
consummation.  There  are  men  all  around  us  work- 
ing so  hard  that  they  have  no  family  life ;  working 
so  hard  that  they  have  no  social  life  ;  working  so 
long  that  they  have  no  time  to  think,  to  look  over  the 
world  and  see  what  a  wonderful  place  this  is  that  we 
have  been  born  into  ;  that  have  no  time  simply  to  live. 
They  are  merely  cogs  in  a  machine  that  turn  as  the 
wheels  turn,  and  that  wear  themselves  out  by  over- 
work and  excess  of  labor.  If  such  men  would  work 
less  and  play  more,  they  would  do  more  work  in  the 
course  of  their  lives,  they  would  do  it  better,  they 
would  help  themselves,  help  their  families  and  help 
the  world  more  efficiently  than  they  are  likely  to  do 
at  present.  We  have  inherited  a  nature  that  tends 
to  excess  in  the  direction  of  work — this  old  Puritan 
nature  that  is  not  yet  eliminated  from  us;  and  the 
competition  of  the  world  drives  us  on.     And  I  do  not 


WORK  AND  PLAT. 


89 


know  for  the  life  of  me  how  you  are  going  to  carry- 
out  the  advice  that  I  give  you.  I  don't  know  how  I 
am  to  obey  my  own  advice  and  practise  my  own 
preaching,  unless  we  can  all  of  us  gradually  bring 
ourselves  into  a  better  condition.  Because  we  are  all 
of  necessity  now  engaged  in  a  battle  for  life,  and  we 
must  work,  we  must  keep  up,  we  must  compete  or 
fall  out.  But  I  believe  that  the  whole  system  is  wrong, 
and  that  by  some  means  or  other  we  ought  to  regu- 
late our  lives  so  that  there  shall  be  more  of  the  play 
element  introduced  into  them.  Play  then  for  recrea- 
tion. Only  make  in  your  minds,  and  practically  carry 
out  in  your  lives,  a  distinction  between  recreation  and 
dissipation,  and  you  will  be  perfectly  safe  in  dealing 
with  this  question. 

Perversions. 

Now,  let  me  practically  apply  in  two  or  three  direc- 
tions some  of  the  principles  that  I  have  developed. 
Let  me  show  two  or  three  ways  in  which  we  may, 
as  I  think,  do  wrong  in  our  amusements.  There 
are  two  points  that  I  wish  to  speak  of,  and  those 
two  points  correspond  to  the  two  ways  in  which  I 
said  it  was  possible  for  us  to  do  wrong.  You  can  sin 
in  your  amusements,  in  the  first  place,  by  perverting 
those  amusements,  by  mingling  them  with  evils  that 
are  no  essential  part  of  them.  For  example,  the 
theatre.     The  theatre  is  right  in  itself,  but  you  know 


go  LIFE    QUESTIONS. 


what  evil  elements  can  creep  into  it,  and  become  so 
much  a  part  of  it,  as  it  is  practically  carried  out  in 
our  city  life,  as  to  make  it  worthless,  or  worse.  Take 
the  matter  of  billiards  —  one  of  the  most  beautiful 
games  ever  invented,  educating  to  the  hand  and  eye, 
a  matter  of  skill  and  nice  discrimination,  beautiful  in 
itself  ;  but  with  a  bar  close  at  hand,  and  the  element 
of  betting  introduced,  it  becomes  degrading  in  its 
whole  nature  and  tendency,  a  place  and  way  to  cor- 
rupt the  young  men  of  the  city.  The  way  to  reform 
this  matter  is  to  have  the  amusement  of  billiards  sep- 
arated and  sifted  from  the  evil  that  becomes  connected 
with  it.  Take  the  billiards  into  your  own  home  or 
into  private  clubs,  into  places  where  you  can  choose 
your  own  company,  and  thus  control  your  surround- 
ings, and  you  will  have  lifted  it  out  of  everything 
that  is  essentially  evil,  and  made  it  clean  and  good. 
So,  take  the  matter  of  cards :  cards  frowned  upon  as 
though  there  was  something  essentially  evil  in  them ; 
cards  driven  off  into  the  corner,  where  evil  people 
usually  get  out  of  sight ;  cards  made  something  for- 
bidden as  a  special  temptation  to  young  people, 
earnest  and  anxious  as  young  people  always  are  to 
find  out  what  you  tell  them  they  ought  not  to  —  you 
can  very  easily  make  them  full  of  danger  to  young 
men.  But  bring  the  cards  into  your  home,  let  the 
children  see  that  they  are  only  pieces  of  pasteboard 
printed  with  certain  kinds  of  spots  upon  them,  that 


WORK  AND  PLAT. 


91 


it  is  simply  a  game  in  which  the  principles  of  chance 
and  skill  are  combined,  eliminating  and  taking  from 
it  everything  that  is  evil,  and  it  becomes  a  perfectly 
healthful  and  simple  amusement  for  your  homes ; 
and  you  rarely  find  your  children  seeking  for  it  in 
bad  places  when  you  allow  them  to  hav^e  it  in  good. 

So,  you  may  take  dancing.  Dancing  in  itself,  the 
beautiful  poetry  of  motion,  as  it  has  so  many  times 
been  called  ;  there  is  nothing  but  beauty  and  grace 
about  it ;  so  natural  that  even  the  soberest  deacon 
naturally  finds  himself,  in  spite  of  his  principles,  beat- 
ing time  with  his  foot  to  a  dancing  piece  of  music, 
finding  his  nature  responding  to  it  so  that  he  can 
hardly  control  himself  —  perfectly  natural  and  moral 
and  right  in  itself,  it  only  needs  to  be  delivered  from 
those  things  that  are  evil.  I  need  not  tell  you  what 
they  are ;  you  know. 

Excess. 

And  now,  just  a  word  on  this  other  principle,  the 
matter  of  excess.  I  think  it  is  excessive  amusement 
when  young  people,  for  example,  go  to  theatre,  or  go 
to  concert,  or  go  to  anything  else,  so  many  nights  in 
the  week  and  stay  so  late  that  they  are  absolutely 
unfit  for  anything  the  next  day.  If  they  go  five 
nights  in  a  week,  so  that  when  Sunday  comes  they 
cannot  possibly  wake  up  in  time  for  church,  even  if 
they  want  to  go,  so  that  they  have  not  a  particle  of 


Q2  LIFE    QUESTIONS. 


vigor  or  strength  left  for  the  work  of  the  Sunday- 
school,  for  visiting  hospitals,  for  doing  anything  that 
indicates  that  they  belong  to  a  higher  range  of  thought 
than  that  which  is  only  fit  for  amusement,  you  know 
perfectly  well  that  this  is  excessive  and  wrong.  But 
it  is  not  that  the  theatre,  or  the  concert,  or  the  dance 
is  wrong,  it  is  simply  an  excessive  use  of  these 
things,  a  lack  of  balance  and  proportion  in  your  life. 

And  then,  there  is  another  way  in  which  you  can 
go  to  excess  in  these  things.  Excess  in  hours  and 
excessive  exertion  tends  to  injure  health.  You  know 
what  that  means,  and  I  need  not  stop  to  enlarge  upon 
it.  You  know  if  you  will  only  think  and  be  guided 
by  reason  and  not  by  impulse,  how  you  can  avoid  the 
evil  and  find  the  good.  But  there  is  one  more  excess 
—  excessive  expense,  excessive  outlay  of  money  and 
means  in  connection  with  any  kind  of  amusement. 
Remember  that  this  is  only  a  part  of  life ;  and  how- 
ever essential  it  may  be,  there  are  things  higher  and 
better  than  simple  amusement ;  and  I  feel  that  I  am 
uttering  the  truth  of  God,  when  I  say  to  you  that  you 
have  no  right  to  waste,  as  thousands  do,  money  and 
means  and  power  that  might  help  lift  up  the  world, 
simply  to  gratify  yourself  in  the  way  of  excessive 
pleasure.  These  principles,  then,  bear  in  mind,  and 
you  need  not  go  far  astray. 

The  whole  subject  naturally  ends  where  I  began. 
Bind    together   at   the   last   these  loose   threads   of 


WORK  AND  PLAY. 


93 


thought  at  the  same  place  where  I  began  to  unravel 
them  ;  and  remember  what  you  are,  what  kind  of 
beings,  what  capacities  lie  dormant  in  you,  what  you 
might  be  if  nobly  and  evenly  developed  ;  and  remem- 
ber the  claims  of  the  world  upon  you  ;  and  remember 
that  the  grand  end  of  life  is  to  live  worthily  as  men 
and  women ;  and  that  work  and  play  are  simply 
ministers  to  serve,  to  cleanse,  to  purify,  to  lift  up  and 
help  on  the  manhood  and  the  womanhood. 


WHAT     IS    THE    TRUE     PLACE     OF    INTELLECTUAL 

CULTURE  ? 

My  next  question  is,  "  What  is  the  Place  of  Intel- 
lectual Culture  in  the  True  Life  ? "  I  am  aware,  and 
would  like  to  suggest  to  you  at  the  outset,  that  I  am 
undertaking  in  a  very  brief  compass,  to  say  something 
about  a  subject  that  is  simply  immense  in  its  propor- 
tions. I  shall  hardly  be  able  in  any  really  exhaustive 
sense  to  enter  it ;  only  to  walk  around  it,  to  point 
out  some  of  its  features,  to  suggest  some  things  for 
your  thought. 

IV/zat  is  Life? 

The  true  place  in  life  of  intellectual  culture.  Before 
we  can  settle  that,  we  must  raise  and  briefly  answer 
the  question  —  what  do  we  mean  when  we  talk  about 
life  .■*  Before  you  can  answer  as  to  what  place  culture 
bears  to  life,  you  must  know  what  you  mean  by  life 


INTELLECT.  95 


itself  ;  that  is,  what  is  the  true  life.     Then  we  can  see 
in  what  relation  to  it  intellectual  culture  stands.     In 
a  word  the  true  life,  as  it  seems  to  me,  for  man,  when 
you  look  at  the  individual,  is  the  cultivation  of  all  his 
faculties,  roundly,   completely  and  as  nobly  as  possi- 
ble.    Man  is  an  animal ;  you  must  treat  and  develop 
his  body  perfectly.     But  he  is  more  than  that  —  he  is 
an  affectional  being ;  you  must  develop  this  side  of 
his  nature.    But  he  is  more  than  that  —  he  has  brain  ; 
you   must  develop  and  cultivate  his  brain.     He  is 
more  than  that  —  he  is  a  moral  being;  you  must  cul- 
tivate and  develop  him  on  this  side  of  his  being.     He 
is  more  even  than  that,  for  the  history  of  the  world 
attests  this  one  truth,   that  instinctively,   naturally, 
necessarily,  man  being  what  he  is,  he  must  dream 
and    think   of  higher   powers   and   forces ;  he   must 
think  of  God  and  he  must  live  in  some  relation  to 
this  ideal  of  God.     Even  if  you  ignore  it,  and  think 
to  call  yourself    an  atheist,  still  that,  in  spite  of  you, 
is  putting  you  into  certain  relations  to  this  idea  of 
God,  as  manifesting  the  fact  that  there  is  a  religious 
side  to  your  being.     Man,   then,  is  all  this,  and  he 
must  be  developed  according  to  that  which  is  highest 
and  best  in  him  ;  that  is,  he  must  make  of  himself  as 
much  and  as  nobly  as  he  can.     But  man  is  not  an 
individual  simply.     He  is  related  to  others  about  him. 
And  so  if  he  live  a  true  life,  he  must  not  only  make 
of  himself  the  truest  and  finest  and  highest,  but  he 


q5  life  questions. 

must  relate  himself  so  to  his  fellow-men  as  that  he 
may  naturally  assist  them  in  a  similar  development 
and  career.  The  man  who  consciously,  earnestly, 
sincerely  seeks  to  lead  a  life  like  that,  is  leading  what 
I  call  a  true  life. 

Life  a  Problem. 

Now,  then,  in  what  relation  to  such  a  life  as  this 
does  what  we  term  intellectual  culture  stand  .-*  After 
you  have  outlined  your  ideal,  after  you  have  decided 
what  you  wish  to  make  of  yourself,  what  point  you 
wish  to  attain,  then  you  have  simply  to  place  be- 
fore yourself  this  problem,  one  that  it  will  take  you 
your  whole  life  long  to  solve.  Life  is  nothing 
more  nor  less  than  an  intellectual  problem,  just 
as  much  so  as  a  question  in  mathematics,  just  as 
much  so  as  a  question  in  astronomy,  just  as  much 
so  as  a  question  that  a  geologist  attempts  to  solve 
in  regard  to  the  state  of  the  earth,  or  the  scientist 
in  any  direction,  whatever  his  department  may  be. 
And  there  is  no  other  question  in  the  world  so 
hard  to  solve,  that  you  may  so  easily  make  mistakes 
in,  and  where  mistakes  are  so  important  and  far- 
reaching  in  their  influence  as  they  are  in  this. 
There  is  no  question,  then,  but  that  you  will  need  all 
the  brain  you  have  as  an  original  endowment,  and  all 
the  brain  power  that  you  can  add  by  the  broadest, 
and  deepest,  and   highest  culture.     There  is  not,  I 


INTELLECT. 


97 


say,  any  danger  but  that  you  will  need  it  all  in  order 
to  get  the  true  answer  to  this  life  problem  that  you 
must,  after  some  fashion,  solve.  It  will  not  be  found 
by  accident,  this  true  answer.  The  person  who  goes 
blundering  into  life  and  expects  to  stumble  on 
success,  may  do  it  once  in  a  million  times,  but  he  is 
almost  foreordained  to  certain  failure.  As  well  toss 
up  a  hat  full  of  figures,  and  expect  them  to  fall  at 
your  feet  in  the  shape  of  a  solution  of  a  problem  in 
algebra,  as  to  expect  to  find  out  the  true  answer  to 
life  without  all  the  study,  and  care,  and  labor,  and 
thought  that  you  can  bestow  upon  it. 

Engine  and  Compass. 

And  yet,  intellectual  culture  is  not  all  of  life.  It  is 
even  the  poorest  half  of  it,  if  you  are  going  to  divide 
it  into  two  parts.  A  man  may  be  a  noble  man,  pure, 
sweet  and  true  in  his  individual  life,  and  in  relation  to 
his  fellow  men,  and  yet  have  nothing  of  what  ordina- 
rily is  called  intellectual  culture.  A  man  may  be 
moderately  successful  in  his  business,  and  not  have 
what  is  ordinarily  called  intellectual  culture.  And 
we  had  better  have  a  true  life,  lived  out  by  instinct, 
stumbled  upon  by  accident,  than  to  have  all  the 
intellectual  culture  in  the  world  that  is  simply 
misapplied.  There  is  no  question,  I  suppose,  that  it 
is  true  that  the  greater  part  of  the  crime  in  the  world 

7 


gS  LIFE  QUESTIONS. 

is  connected  with  ignorance.  And  yet,  there  is 
nothing  in  the  cultivation  of  the  intellect  itself,  pure 
and  simple,  that  will  necessarily  make  a  man  virtu- 
ous, or  honest,  or  pure,  or  true.  Goethe  caught  that 
idea  when  he  represented  the  intellectual  mightiness 
and  subtlety  of  Mephistopheles ;  a  man  simply  with  a 
mighty  brain,  and  no  conscience,  is  only  a  humanly 
cultivated  tiger,  set  loose  among  the  defenceless  and 
the  weak  in  society.  The  one  grand  thing,  then,  the 
very  foundation  of  a  man,  and  that  which  is  the 
mightiest  moving  force  of  his  life,  and  must  be,  is 
the  moral  quality  of  his  being.  Take  an  old  illustra- 
tion, as  good  for  the  purpose  as  any.  You  may  show 
the  relation  that  stands  between  the  moral  faculty 
and  the  intellectual  in  man  by  thinking  of  a  steam- 
ship in  mid-ocean  ;  an  engine  in  the  hold,  is  the 
power  that  moves  it  somewhere,  that  keeps  it  from 
simply  drifting  at  the  mercy  of  wind  and  wave.  This 
power,  as  related  to  man,  is  always  a  moral  power,  a 
moral  force.  It  is  something  apart  from  what  we 
mean  when  we  simply  speak  of  brain.  The  motive 
force  of  life  is  the  moral  force.  But  what  good  if  you 
have  a  hundred,  or  a  thousand  horse  power  engine  in 
the  hold  of  your  steamer,  and  that  is  all .-'  If  you 
have  no  compass,  if  you  have  no  helm,  if  you  have  no 
strong  hand  and  clear,  intelligent  brain  at  the  wheel  .-* 
The  compass,  the  helm,  and  the  man  at  the  wheel,  all 
three  combined,  may  fairly  and  correctly  be  repre- 


lyTELLECT.  QQ 


sented  by  the  intellectual  culture  of  a  man.  The 
moral  power  will  drive  him — where?  Somewhere; 
to  a  good  place  or  a  bad ;  up  and  down  the  ocean 
aimlessly,  to  a  distant  port  or  on  the  rocks,  just  as  it 
happens,  unless  there  is  compass,  helm,  and  a  man  at 
the  wheel.  And  suppose  you  have  a  compass  cor- 
rectly adjusted ;  suppose  you  have  a  helm  ever  so 
finely  constructed ;  suppose  you  have  the  most 
cultivated  and  skillful  pilot  at  the  wheel,  then  what 
if  you  have  no  engine,  with  its  mighty  moving  power 
in  the  hold  .^  you  are  still  at  the  mercy  of  wind  and 
wave.  You  need  them  both,  then,  and  we  must,  for 
our  purpose  this  morning,  presuppose  the  existence 
of  this  moral  force  of  a  man  that  drives  him  on  in 
some  direction. 

Meanmg  of  Culture. 

And  now  let  us  proceed  to  treat  of  the  importance 
of  this  power  that  guides  —  the  intellectual  culture  of 
a  man.  Intellectual  culture.  I  want  to  free  the  last 
of  these  two  words  from  the  popular  abuse  that  has 
been  heaped  upon  it,  and  give  you  a  clear  conception 
of  the  noble  and  dignified  meaning  that  we  ought 
always  to  attach  to  it.  There  are  so  many  people  in 
society,  who,  just  because  they  can  read  a  little 
smattering  of  poetry,  or  because  they  have  learned 
the  Greek  alphabet,  or  because  they  can  drum  very 
badly  on  the  piano,  or  because  they  can  speak  a  little 


lOO  I^^FE    QUESTIONS. 


French  so  that  nobody  in  Paris  would  ever  under- 
stand it ;  or  because  of  something  purely  superficial 
in  this  direction,  consider  themselves  cultured,  and 
arrogate  to  themselves  this  grand  and  noble  word ; 
and  so  the  word  itself  comes  to  be  brought  into 
universal,  and  as  to  this  usage,  deserved  contempt. 
What  do  we  mean  by  culture  ?  Take  the  analogues 
of  it  in  other  directions.  It  is  simply  the  old  word 
cultivation.  It  means  that  which  you  add  to  the  raw 
material,  in  any  direction,  by  skill  and  labor.  Take 
a  piece  of  crude  iron  ore  out  of  the  mine,  smelt  it, 
convert  it  into  pig  iron.  You  have  cultivated  it  out 
of  a  lower  stage  into  a  higher.  Take  your  piece  of 
pig  iron  and  convert  it  into  steel.  By  the  process  of 
culture,  the  application  of  skill  and  labor,  you  have 
lifted  it  another  grade.  Take  your  piece  of  steel,  and 
manufacture  with  it  the  highest,  and  the  finest,  and 
the  most  beautiful  things  that  can  be  constructed  out 
of  such  material.  You  have  cultivated  it  still  further. 
Take  your  piece  of  swamp  land,  drain  it,  cut  down 
the  trees  that  are  useless  there,  apply  your  chemicals 
to  the  soil,  turn  it  into  a  field  of  grain,  or  a  garden, 
or  a  bit  of  beautiful  park.  You  have  cultivated  your 
land,  you  have  applied  to  it  the  principles  of  culture. 
So  in  any  direction  precisely  the  same  illustration 
will  hold.  And  so  a  man  cultivates  his  hand  when 
he  learns  a  trade,  or  when  he  learns  to  play  on  a 
oiano.     He  cultivates  his  eve  when  he  learns  to  use. 


INTELLECT.  jqi 


the  microscope.  The  child  cultivates  the  foot  when 
he  learns  to  walk.  You  cultivate  any  part  of  your 
body;  and  the  brain  is  cultivated  when  you  develop 
the  raw  material  of  that  power,  and  make  it  applica- 
ble to  the  great  problems  and  affairs  of  life,  with 
which  you  need  intellectually  to  deal.  Intellectual 
culture,  then,  means  the  brain  made  the  most  of,  the 
brain  developed,  the  brain  cultivated,  blossoming, 
bearing  its  finest,  sweetest,  and  truest  fruit. 

Bread-winning  Problem. 

Now,  then,  after  you  have  found  out,  as  I  said  a 
moment  ago,  what  the  true  life  means,  it  is  by  the 
power  of  the  brain,  and  the  brain  alone,  that  you 
must  solve  these  practical  problems  of  life.  Let  us 
look  at  two  or  three  of  them  and  see  what  I  mean. 
In  the  first  place  remember,  your  friends  for  you,  or 
you  for  yourself,  must  settle  the  initial  problem  of 
your  existence.  The  problem  is,  where  you  will  plant 
your  feet  in  the  world,  what  place  you  will  stand  in, 
what  position  you  will  occupy,  what  you  will  attempt 
to  do,  what  you  will  make  your  life  work ;  you  must 
solve  first,  because  it  is  the  very  condition  of  exist- 
ence, this  problem  of  bread  winning :  and  it  lies  at 
the  foundation  of  them  all.  It  is  just  because  there 
are  so  many  men  in  America,  so  many  men  in  the 
world,   that  either    through  their  own  fault,  or  the 


I02  LIFE    QUESTIONS. 


fault  of  society,  or  government,  have  not  as  yet 
applied  to  this  the  efforts  of  a  cultured  brain,  that 
they  do  not  have  food.  I  say  it  is  because  of  this, 
that  there  is  such  disaster  in  the  social  world,  such 
disaster  in  the  labor  field,  that  there  are  so  many 
tramps,  paupers  and  criminals.  These  men  that  we 
call  tramps,  are  simply  the  men  that  have  tried  to 
solve  the  problem  of  bread-winning,  and  have  failed. 
They  have  tried  to  give  a  true  answer  to  that  ques- 
tion, like  a  boy  trying  to  cipher  out  his  first  question 
in  arithmetic,  and  they  have  not  found  the  true 
answer.  And  the  false  answer  is  written  in  rags, 
and  dirt,  and  hunger,  and  sorrow,  and  the  outcast 
condition  in  which  they  hang  on  the  brink,  or  sink 
into  the  depths  of  society.  It  needs  intellectual 
culture,  then,  to  settle  this  problem,  as  simple  as  it 
seems  to  some  of  us. 

Moral  Problems. 

And  then,  next,  you  are  faced  by  moral  questions 
that  you  must  answer.  And  here  I  wish  to  emphasize 
the  huge  mistake  that  people  make  concerning  their 
consciences.  It  is  always  the  intellect  that  ought  to 
be  cultivated ;  the  intellect  that  answers  and  settles 
questions  of  right  and  wrong.  It  is  never  the  con- 
science, as  that  word  is  popularly  used,  that  settles 
this  question.  You  need  brain,  and  cultivated  brain, 
to  settle  it.     It  is  no  slight  question.     Conscience  is 


INTELLECT.  103 


simply  that  power  in  you  which  tells  you  that  you 
ought ;  it  does  not  even  attempt  to  answer  the  ques- 
tion, ought  what?  It  simply  says  ought  and  ought 
not.  It  leaves  you  to  settle  the  question  of  how  to 
apply  this  sense  of  duty.  It  is  prejudice,  it  is  training, 
it  is  all  sorts  of  things  that  determine  the  consciences 
of  people  to-day.  And  if  I  should  take  any  one 
question  and  fling  it  in  the  midst  of  you,  I  should 
split  you  all  into  parties,  probably,  concerning  it,  as 
to  whether  it  was  right  or  wrong.  Your  conscience 
does  not  settle  that  question  for  you.  It  is  intelli- 
gence that  settles  it;  it  is  judgment;  it  is  study  of 
the  past  history  of  the  world  ;  it  is  looking  over  the 
attempts  that  have  been  made  to  settle  this  question 
before,  to  find  out  the  results,  practically,  among  men, 
of  certain  courses  of  action,  this  way  and  that.  The 
result  that  is  good,  conscience  ought  to  approve;  the 
result  that  is  bad,  conscience  ought  to  disapprove. 
But  it  is  intellect,  and  the  cultured  intellect,  that  must 
find  out  whether  these  things  are  bad  or  good,  or 
whether  these  particular  plans  shall  work  out  bad  or 
good  in  society ;  whether  this  particular  drift  and 
movement  of  men  shall  issue  in  light  or  darkness,  in 
happiness  or  misery,  in  right  or  wrong. 

Religious  Problems. 
And  then  there  come  up  the  religious  questions 


I04  LIF^   QUESTIONS. 

of  the  world  for  solution.  And  here,  again,  let  me 
echo  —  and  I  wish  I  could  echo  and  re-echo  it  all  over 
America  —  the  idea  that  no  man  has  any  right  to  his 
religious  opinions  simply  because  he  chooses  to  call 
them  his.  You  have  no  right  to  cling  to  them  because 
you  love  them,  any  more  than  a  family  that  is  living 
in  a  particular  locality  has  a  right  to  stay  there  be- 
cause they  love  the  place,  and  because  they  have 
become  accustomed  to  the  house  and  the  surround- 
ings, even  though  they  have  discovered  that  it  would 
be  at  the  cost  of  the  health  and  life  of  all  the  children 
and  all  the  friends.  A  man,  to  find  out  what  his 
religion  ought  to  be,  must  study,  and  he  must  think ; 
he  must  know  what  religious  experiments  have  been 
tried,  and  whether  they  have  succeeded  or  failed  ; 
whether  they  have  helped  men  up  or  helped  them 
down.  And  he  ought  to  be  able  to  look  over  the 
world  to-day  and  find  out  what  are  the  great  religious 
forces  and  movements  at  work.  Here  is  a  form  of 
religion.  If  the  principles  on  which  it  is  founded  and 
its  practical  power  were  only  worked  out  in  society, 
what  kind  of  society  would  it  make .-'  Would  it  make 
men  better  or  worse  .'*  Would  it  helja  them  up  or 
down  .-•  I  say  you  must,  before  you  can  answer  this 
question  of  what  your  religious  opinions  ought  to  be, 
and  with  what  religious  movement  you  ought  to  cast 
in  your  lot,  what  religious  power  you  ought  to  help 
on,  you  must  be  able  to  answer  the  question  as  to 


INTELLECT.  loq 


what  the  religious  experience  of  the  world  has  been. 
Take,  for  example,  the  Catholic  Church.  Is  it  capable 
of  solving  the  great  problems  of  the  world  that  face 
us  to-day,  and  that  will  face  us  in  the  future  .'*  Take 
the  Evangelical  Protestant  Church.  Is  it  founded  on 
righteousness  and  on  truth,  and  if  carried  out  to  its 
logical  conclusion  will  it  make  the  world  better  or 
worse  ?  It  is  by  study  like  this  that  you  must  settle 
the  question  as  to  what  your  religious  opinions  ought 
to  be ;  and  you  must  not  hold  on  to  this  opinion,  or 
that,  simply  because  you  love  it.  You  have  no  busi- 
ness to  love  that  which  is  not  for  the  welfare  of  your 
fellow-men.  You  must  study  and  think,  and  so  find 
out  that  which  represents  God's  truth  for  to-day  and 
to-morrow,  and  stand  by  that. 

Social  Problems. 

And  then  there  are  social  problems.  I  need  not 
enlarge  upon  them  to  tell  you  what  they  are;  they 
are  all  about  us,  problems  that  need  study,  that  need 
thought.  Why,  good  nature,  a  loving  heart,  a  tender 
conscience,  these  have  not  the  power  to  settle  the 
questions  of  suffrage,  education,  poverty  and  crime. 
They  stand  in  no  sort  of  relation  to  the  settlement  of 
questions  like  these.  When  a  person  is  simply  gov- 
erned by  impulse,  by  good  nature,  by  good  feeling, 
unless  he  have  a  clear  brain  and  have  studied,  how 


I06  LIFE    QUESTIONS. 


can  he  know  what  will  be  the  probable  issue  of  a 
particular  action  in  which  he  engages  ?  He  may  be 
doing  as  much  mischief  as  good.  And  many  a  time 
it  has  proved  in  the  history  of  the  past,  that  the 
courses  of  action  which  men  have  lovingly,  nobly 
and  generously  entered  upon  have  ended  in  disaster 
and  evil,  all  for  lack  of  intelligence,  for  lack  of  wit, 
and  thought,  and  reading,  and  study. 

Political  Problems. 

And  then  the  same  is  true  in  regard  to  our  political 
life.  Most  men  are  Republican  or  Democrat,  or 
whatever  it  may  be,  just  because  their  father  was  so, 
or  because  of  the  newspaper  that  they  read,  never 
looking  at  anything  said  on  the  other  side ;  or 
because  of  prejudice,  or  because  they  became  one  or 
the  other  twenty  years  ago  and  have  not  waked  up 
to  the  fact  that,  possibly,  the  old  problems  that 
divided  them  are  all  worn  out  and  foregone,  and  that 
new  problems  are  pressing  and  cannot  be  decided  in 
the  old  way.  You  have  no  right  to  remain  Democrat 
or  Republican  beyond  another  election,  simply  be- 
cause you  were  one  at  the  last  election.  These 
things  involve  problems  of  right  and  wrong,  of  good 
government,  of  principle,  of  humanity,  of  righteous- 
ness, of  truth.  And  above  and  beyond  all  ideas  of 
loyalty  to   this   or   that   party,  beyond  all  ideas  of 


INTELLECT. 


107 


associations,  of  friendship,  and  love  for  names  and 
traditions,  there  stands  in  the  face  of  every  clear- 
headed, honest-hearted  man,  the  outline  and  image  of 
God's  truth,  which  is  the  truth  of  human  rights  and 
human  destinies.  And  it  is  your  duty  to  see  that 
and  watch  for  the  lifted  finger  and  go  wherever  it 
points,  whether  it  be  with  your  old  traditions  and  old 
ideas  or  ao:ainst  them. 


'•&'• 


Intelliorence  Settles  Them. 


"ti 


All  these  things,  then,  subordinate  to  the  question 
of  the  true  life  and  making  up  the  great  practical 
problems  of  the  world,  are  questions  that  must  be 
settled  by  intelligence,  by  intellectual  culture,  as  that 
word  is  used  in  its  broadest  and  deepest  sense. 

Having,  then,  given  this  simple  outline  treatment, 
I  must  turn  now  to  the  second  part  of  my  subject, 
which  concerns  itself  with  that  which  is  ordinarily 
called  literature,  and  which  is  popularly  regarded  as 
almost  the  only  thing  that  is  meant  when  we  speak 
of  intellectual  culture.  I  refer  to  books,  to  the  read- 
ing, to  the  literature  of  the  world.  And  here  again  I 
must  only  outline  the  grand,  great  thoughts  that 
I  have  in  mind,  and  that  might  detain  me  if  I  could 
only  dwell  upon  them  for  an  hour. 

Books  and  Memory. 
In  the  first  place,  on  this  subject  of  books,  just  try 


I08  LIFE  QUESTIONS. 

to  imagine  for  a  moment  the  debt  of  the  world  to  the 
books  of  the  world ;  conceive,  if  you  can,  for  an 
instant,  all  the  libraries  of  the  world  annihilated  — 
every  book  on  the  face  of  the  earth  blotted  out  — 
what  a  world,  what  a  life  would  it  leave  for  us  !  I 
can  compare  it  to  nothing  better  than  to  a  man  forty  or 
fifty  years  of  age,  who  should  be  suddenly,  by  some  sort 
of  stroke  upon  the  brain,  deprived  at  once  of  all  mem- 
ory of  his  past  life  ;  perfectly  well  and  strong  in  every 
other  respect ;  a  fully  developed  brain,  standing  in  the 
midst  of  a  great  waste  of  years  that  are  blank.  He 
would  not  know  himself ;  he  would  not  understand 
where  he  came  from,  what  he  was,  or  what  was  the 
tendency  and  drift  of  his  life.  Just  as  this  memory 
of  ours  stands  in  relation  to  the  past  life  behind  us  — 
to  yesterday,  to  last  year,  to  the  friends  that  we  have 
associated  with,  to  the  experience  we  have  gone 
through,  to  the  lessons  we  have  learned,  to  the  hard- 
ships we  have  borne,  to  the  triumphs  and  failures  of 
the  past,  and  takes  us  away  back  to  childhood  and  its 
simple  plays  and  companionships,  and  sets  us  again 
on  father's  knee,  and  lets  us  kneel  at  mother's  lap, 
and  teaches  us  the  cradle  of  circumstances  and  the 
kind  of  love  in  which  we  were  wrought,  and  out  of 
which  we  were  born  —  just,  I  say,  as  this  memory 
does  this  for  the  individual,  so  the  books  and  litera- 
ture of  the  world  stand  related  to  the  life  of  the 
grand  individual,  humanity,  man.     The  literature  of 


INTELLECT. 


109 


the  world  is  the  world's  memory,  the  world's  expe- 
rience, the  world's  triumphs,  the  world's  failures.  It 
teaches  us  where  we  came  from ;  it  teaches  us  the 
paths  we  have  travelled,  the  thoughts  we  have  had 
in  the  world,  and  the  tendency  of  those  courses  of 
thought.  It  teaches  us  the  drift  of  things  and  which 
way  we  are  going. 

Stand  at  St.  Louis,  if  you  please,  on  the  banks  of 
the  Mississippi  River  ;  and  if  the  upper  Mississippi 
were  a  perfect   blank   to   you,  if   you   had   not   the 
slightest  idea  whether  it  came  from  the  north,  south 
east  or  west,  or  how  long  it  had  been  coming,  you 
could  have  no  possible  conception  of  the  river  there, 
or  which  way  it  was  likely  to  go.     But  if  you  had 
traced  it  from  its  source  to  St.  Louis,  then,  practi- 
cally, you  know  the  rest,  for  you  have  got  the  general 
trend  and  drift  of  the  mighty  stream  and  know  which 
way  it  is  tending.     And  so  we,  as  we  go  back  and 
study  Egypt,  and  study  Assyria,  and  study  the  old 
Sanscrit  of  India,  the  bibles  of  the  ages,  the  litera- 
ture of  the  past,  we  find  out  where  humanity  came 
from  ;  we  find  out  by  what  paths  it  has  come,  and 
where  it  stands  to-day  ;  and  we  can  reasonably  fore- 
cast the  future  and  know  what  humanity  probably  will 
be  in  the  ages  that  are  to  come. 

Are  Books  Practical  ? 

People  sometimes  talk  about  Darwin  and  Spencer, 


no  LIFE  QUESTIONS. 

the  geologists,  and  Wallace  the  naturalist,  these  men 
that  are  studying  these  problems  that  concern  the 
very  beginning  of  the  world,  as  though  they  were  not 
practical,  as  though  they  did  not  deal  with  live  ques- 
tions. Why,  they  are  the  livest  questions  in  the 
world.  Here  is  a  man  who  has  found  out  that  in 
some  other  continent  or  far  off  land  from  which  his 
ancestors  came,  there  is  a  large  property  that  pos- 
sibly he  may  inherit.  Does  it  not  mean  anything  to 
him,  then,  to  trace  his  genealogy,  to  find  out  where 
he  was  born,  to  find  out  by  what  paths  the  line  of 
descent  has  travelled,  and  whether  it  comes  to  him. 
Why,  when  Darwin  and  those  men  shall  have  settled 
some  of  these  questions  that  constitute  the  books  and 
literature  of  the  present  day,  we  shall  find  out  where 
man  came  from,  and  then  we  shall  know  what  he  is, 
and  what  he  may  reasonably  expect  to  inherit  in  the 
future. 

W/zai  to  Read. 

Pass  rapidly  from  that  to  another  point.  What 
ought  a  man  to  read  first  —  what  books  .-•  In  the 
first  place,  a  man  ought  to  consider  the  literature  of 
the  world  as  simply  a  great  store-house  of  tools  or 
weapons,  into  which  he  is  going  to  equip  himself  for 
the  special  life  that  he  is  to  lead.  That  is,  a  lawyer 
must  read  and  study  law ;  a  merchant  his  business  ; 
the  doctor  his,  and  the  farmer  his.     And  so  every 


INTELLECT.  1 1 1 

man  must  go  and  equip  himself.  It  is  not  the  man 
who  has  read  the  most  who  is  the  best  equipped. 
You  may  take  a  carpenter  and  let  him  stretch  out 
his  arms,  and  you  may  pile  them  full  of  tools,  and 
just  because  he  has  so  many  of  them  he  is  utterly 
unfitted  to  do  any  work.  When  David  put  on  the 
armor  of  Saul  he  found  it  so  cumbrous  and  heavy 
that  he  could  not  wear  it.  He  could  not  fight  with 
that  armor.  He  was  too  much  armed.  It  was  all 
well  enough  for  Saul,  but  give  David  his  sling  and 
his  little  smooth  stones  from  the  brook.  So  a  man 
must  first  arm  and  equip  himself  to  do  the  particular 
work  in  which  he  is  to  engage. 

Idealising  the  Real. 

But  there  is  another  thing  in  which  it  seems  to  me 
business  men  lose  more  than  they  are  ever  aware  of, 
and  that  is  for  lack  of  idealizing  the  business  in 
which  they  are  engaged.  What  do  I  mean  by  that  ^ 
I  mean,  suppose  you  are  a  druggist,  that  you  should 
not  simply  find  out  how  much  a  particular  drug  costs 
at  wholesale  when  you  buy  it,  and  then  how  much 
more  you  can  get  for  it  by  the  pound  or  by  the  ounce 
when  you  sell  it  again  ;  that  is,  merely  make  it  a 
money -making  business.  Let  the  druggist  read 
something  outside  of  what  really  contributes  to 
making  money;    know  his  business  ideally;    where 


112  LIFE    QUESTIONS. 

the  drugs  and  the  elements  ot  them  come  from  ; 
what  they  are  chemically  ;  where  they  grow  ;  by  what 
process  they  have  come  to  be  as  they  are.  And  so 
the  banker,  the  merchant  in  any  department,  and 
the  lawyer.  Read  outside  of  that  which  simply  can 
be  coined  into  coppers,  so  as  to  enlarge  upon  and 
idealize  your  business  and  make  it  beautiful  beyond 
its  simple  use. 

Time  to  Read. 

And  then  every  man,  it  seems  to  me,  should  do 
something  in  his  reading  beyond  even  this.  Men 
tell  me  they  have  no  time  to  read.  I  do  not  like  to 
contradict  people,  but  I  do  not  believe  a  word  of  it. 
There  is  not  a  man  who  has  reached  the  age  of  forty 
or  fifty  years,  who  has  not  had  time  to  read  all  the 
truly  great  books  in  the  world.  Suppose  you  read 
only  one  book  a  year.  Take  such  a  little  book  as 
Dana's  Geological  Story  Briefly  Told.  There  is  not 
a  man  here  who  could  not  read  it  in  the  time  that  he 
spends  over  the  useless  parts  of  his  newspaper  in 
three  months.  And  yet  it  opens  to  him  a  stretch 
of  past  history  clear  back,  not  only  to  the  begin- 
ning of  this  planet,  but  into  the  distant  nebulae 
beyond  —  opens  up  grand  avenues  of  thought,  and 
life,  and  being,  that  he  does  not  dream  of.  I  was 
talking  with  a  merchant  the  other  day,  who  had 
retired  from  business,  and  I  was  particularly  pleased 


INTELLECT.  1 1 3 


with  one  thing  he  told  me.  He  said,  "  I  don't  want 
for  resources,  for  I  have  done  what  most  merchants, 
so  far  as  my  acquaintance  with  them  is  concerned, 
do  not  do.  I  have  compelled  myself  always  to  take 
time  to  read  and  to  think.  My  business  has  not 
suffered  for  it.  And  now,  all  this  world  that  I  have 
created  for  myself  by  my  thinking  and  reading,  is 
open  to  me  to  enter,  to  live  in,  to  enjoy  myself  in." 
Just  this  is  the  reason  why  most  merchants  can 
never,  with  any  comfort,  retire  from  business.  They 
have  gone  through  life  so  absorbed  in  business  that 
they  simply  and  absolutely  know  nothing  else,  and 
can  do  nothing  else.  That  is,  they  have  made  them- 
selves simply  machines  to  perform  a  particular  piece 
of  work  ;  and  if  they  stop  doing  that,  they  have  got 
to  stop  doing  everything.  Be  a  man  beyond  the 
bread-winning ;  both  sides  of  it,  all  around  it. 

I  said  a  moment  ago,  and  I  wish  to  repeat  it,  that 
you  can,  every  one  of  you,  if  you  will,  read  all  the 
great  books  of  the  world.  If  you  go  into  a  library, 
say  of  ten  thousand  volumes  — which  is  only  a  small 
one — and  then  look  at  some  of  the  great  libraries  that 
reach  up  into  the  thousands  and  hundreds  of  thou- 
sands, it  seems  an  everlasting  work  to  read  anything. 
But  the  most  of  these  books  are  only  fragments. 
The  great  books  of  the  world,  those  that  let  you  into 
the  grand  secrets  of  the  world's  thought  and  life,  I 
can  count  on  my  fingers  by  not  going  over  them 
8 


114  LIFE    QUESTIONS. 


more  than  twice.  By  reading  one  of  them  a  year 
you  can  become  acquainted  with  the  whole  of  them 
in  any  ordinary  business  life. 

Mental  Atmosphere. 

Another  point :  the  soil  that  is  about  your  house, 
the  exhalations  from  it,  the  air  you  breathe  and  the 
food  you  eat,  make  you  what  you  are  physically. 
And  so  the  intellectual  soil  in  which  you  grow,  the 
exhalations  from  it,  the  literary  air  that  you  breathe, 
the  books  that  you  read,  the  mental  pabulum  with 
which  you  fill  yourself,  these  make  you  mentally  and 
morally.  Then  beware  that  you  read  good  books, 
that  you  eat  mentally  good  food  —  that  is  what  it 
means.  For  there  are  thousands  of  people  who  admit 
into  their  homes  and  into  intimate  association  with 
the  mental  and  moral  life  of  their  children,  books  of 
such  a  character,  that  if  they  should  only  creep  out  of 
their  covers  and  get  into  coats  and  hats,  they  would 
be  incontinently  kicked  into  the  streets.  People  asso- 
ciate in  literature  with  that  which  is  vile  and  mean 
and  contemptible,  that  which  is  weak  —  which  is  the 
next  worse  vice  in  a  book  —  where  they  would  not 
think  of  associating  with  people  who  had  a  character 
like  it.  What  is  it  that  makes  a  good  man  .''  Moral 
qualities  make  a  good  man.  It  does  not  make  a  great 
man,  because  a  great  man  needs  brain  and  thought 


INTELLECT.  j  i  5 


superadded  to  moral  qualities.  But  a  good  book 
needs  something  beside  moral  character ;  it  needs 
moral  character  and  it  needs  intellectual  character. 
And  it  is  not  worth  your  while  to  waste  your  time  over 
a  book  that  has  not  something  of  power  in  it.  A  book 
that  was  not,  when  it  was  written,  inspired  by  the  life 
of  the  writer,  never  can  inspire  you.  A  book  that 
does  not  come  out  of  an  elevated  mental  and  moral 
birth  cannot  elevate  and  lift  up  your  life.  A  book, 
then,  needs  to  be  both  good  and  great  to  be  worthy 
of  your  attention.  It  needs  to  be  a  book  that  has 
life  in  it,  and  power,  and  thought,  and  suggestion. 

The   Society   of  Books. 

Think  for  a  minute  what  grand  company  is  open 
to  all.  I  talked  to  you  a  little  while  ago  about  socie- 
ty. It  is  very  difficult  for  us  sometimes  to  get  into 
what  we  call  the  best  society  here  in  Boston  or  New 
York.  But  think  what  a  grand  society  is  open  to 
every  man  that  chooses  to  enter  it  in  the  literature  of 
the  world.  In  your  little  room  —  no  matter  if  it  is  a 
small  room,  if  it  is  a  corner  in  the  sitting-room,  if  it 
is  a  little  place  that  you  dignify  by  the  name  of  libra- 
ry, no  matter  if  it  is  a  fourth-story  chamber  and  small 
and  dingy  at  that  —  old  Homer  is  not  ashamed  to 
come  to  you  and  sing  his  immortal  song.  You  can 
open  the  door  and  Dante  will  come  in,  walking  with 


Il6  LIFE  QUESTIONS. 

that  sad  and  downcast  face  and  air  that  in  his  old 
age,  after  his  outcast  life,  made  the  children,  as  they 
looked  at  him,  stare  and  say,  "  There  is  the  man  that 
has  been  in  hell."  Goethe  will  come  with  all  his  wis- 
dom. The  grave  and  simple  Shakspeare  bringing 
the  grand  train  of  all  his  imaginary  creations  —  more 
real  than  most  men  in  flesh  and  blood.  Milton  will 
open  to  you  his  grand  conception  of  heaven  and  hell 
—  a  whole  universe  inside  of  two  covers.  Charles 
Lamb  will  sit  and  chat  with  you  in  his  beautiful,  sim- 
ple, loving,  child -like  essays.  You  can  invite  an 
astronomer,  and  while  you  dream  your  waking  dream 
under  his  guidance,  travel  to  the  moon  and  from 
planet  to  planet,  until  you  stand  on  the  uttermost 
verge  of  this  solar  system  ;  and  then,  with  one  bold 
leap  of  your  fancy,  to  the  stars  so  far  away  that  their 
light  has  been  thousands  of  years  in  travelling  to  the 
earth  ;  standing  thus  at  the  centre  of  this  vast  cosmos 
and  reading  the  secrets  of  the  universe.  With  a 
geologist  you  may  travel  back  and  down  and  learn 
how  the  earth  has  grown.  This  grandest  company 
you  can  keep,  if  you  will,  in  books.  And  remember 
that  these  mental  associations  make  you  quite  as 
much  as  the  men  and  women  you  associate  with  — 
perhaps  more.  There  are  characters  in  Dickens, 
there  are  characters  of  the  great  novelists  and  drama- 
tists of  the  world,  that  are  more  vitally  real  in  their 
power  and  influence  over  you  than  the  men  you  shake 


INTELLECT. 


117 


hands  with  on  the  street.  For  you  do  not  simply  see 
their  outside,  you  are  let  into  the  secrets  of  heart  and 
brain,  reading  the  motives  that  have  made  them  what 
they  are. 

Books   Broaden   Men. 

I  had  intended  to  speak  of  the  power  of  books  to 
broaden  men,  to  bring  them  into  sympathy  with 
other  schools  and  styles  of  thought.  Why,  there  are 
people  that  read  nothing  but  the  Bible.  Grand  book, 
properly  treated,  as  it  is ;  but  until  they  have  read 
other  bibles,  until  they  have  studied  it  as  a  literature, 
and  seen  how  it  grows,  and  by  what  process  it  has 
come  to  be  what  it  is,  they  can  never  understand  it. 
It  is  a  sealed  book  to  them  until  they  borrow  the 
keys  of  other  literatures  and  other  religions  with 
which  to  open  it.  Men  are  unjust,  and  bigoted,  and 
unkind,  simply  for  lack  of  this  intellectual  culture 
that  shall  bring  them  into  sympathy  with  the  thoughts 
of  other  lands  and  other  worlds.  Do  you  suppose 
we  should  be  troubled  with  the  Chinese  question, 
to-day,  if  the  ordinary  people  were  familiar  with 
Chinese  thought  and  Chinese  modes  of  life  .■'  What 
does  it  mean  that  we  can  be  unkind  and  hard  on  this 
and  other  nations,  and  call  them  flippantly  and  sneer- 
ingly  foreigners  and  outsiders  ?  It  means  simply 
that  we  lack  sympathy  for  them,  that  we  do  not 
understand  them,  that  we  have  not  thought  and  read. 


jl8  I^JF^  QUESTIONS. 


Books  as  Recreation, 

And  now  for  my  last  thought,  and  a  brief  one  it 
must  be.  Use  literature  simply  as  play,  when  you 
have  earned  the  right.  There  is  nothing  I  prize  so 
much  as  I  do  my  books,  outside  of  my  duties  and  my 
human  relations.  When  I  am  tired  I  can  pick  up  a 
book  and  make  a  tour  in  Central  Asia,  in  the  Pacific 
islands,  among  the  ice  fields  of  the  North.  I  can  sit 
for  a  while  under  palm  trees  in  tropical  climes ;  I 
can  see  the  glance  and  gleam  of  beautiful  foliage 
through  the  trees,  and  hear  marvellous  songs  from 
birds  I  have  never  seen.  Take  excursions  under  the 
guidance  of  your  books,  and  go  off  for  a  while  out 
of  the  weary  world  of  toil,  and  rest. 

But  the  one  grand  thing,  as  I  said  at  the  outset,  is 
life;  and  the  bearing  of  this  problem  of  life  on  all 
these  things  is  the  important  matter.  Whatever 
helps  you  in  books,  or  reading,  or  literary  culture,  to 
live  a  broader  or  nobler  life,  is  God-sent  and  God- 
blessed.  Whatever  hinders  or  drags  you  down  is 
inspired,  not  from  above,  but  from  below.  Make  all 
things,  then,  help  on  a  true,  a  pure,  and  a  noble  life. 


SHALL    I    TRY    TO    BE    RICH. 

Youth  and  Dreams. 

Spring  is  the  time  for  dreams.  The  tender  skies, 
the  bursting  buds,  the  patches  of  green  here  and 
there,  have  in  them  suggestions  of  infinite  visions. 
If  one  isn't  touched  by  it,  it  is  because  sensibility 
has  decayed.  And  the  morning  earth  and  sky  —  how 
different  are  they  from  the  sober,  white  light  of  noon, 
or  the  hour  when  twilight  shadows  gather !  To  a 
full,  flushing  vitality,  almost  anything  seems  possible 
in  the  morning.  The  early  morning  means  poetry 
and  hope.  And  youth  is  both  morning  and  spring 
in  one.  What  wonder,  then,  if  young  men  and 
young  women  dream  ?  Then  they  stand  on  moun- 
tain tops,  and  all  the  kingdoms  of  the  world  and  the 
glory  of  them  lie  spread  out  at  their  feet.  Their 
cloudy  fancies  are  palaces  ;  and  to  scale  the  heavens 
and  find  them  realities  seems  an  easy  task.  And 
who  would  have  it  otherwise  .-•  Let  the  mountain 
brook  babble  and  laugh  and  dash  itself  into  feathery 


I20  LIFE  QUESTIONS. 

spray ;  it  will  flow  deeply  and  turn  mill  wheels  quietly 
enough  by-and-by.  Every  healthy,  vigorous  young 
person,  when  starting  out  into  the  world,  though  for 
a  time  pillowed  on  hard  stones,  like  Jacob,  is  sure, 
like  him,  to  dream  of  opening  heavens,  of  ladders 
reaching  to  the  sky,  and  of  angels  ascending  and 
descending.  It  is  easy  enough  to  smile  at  these 
"great  expectations."  But  though  it  is  too  true  that 
most  of  such  visions  fade,  yet  I  do  not  believe  any 
one  ever  achieved  much  who  did  not  dream  of  great 
things.  Imagination  lures  us  on,  and  we  turn  into 
fact  as  many  of  its  bright  forms  as  we  can. 

An  Earthly  Paradise. 

And  it  is  a  principle  true  of  all  visions  that,  how- 
ever strange  or  wonderful  they  may  be,  they  are  all 
made  up  of  combinations  of  common,  human,  earthly 
things.  You  may  dream  of  a  human -headed  lion 
with  wings ;  it  is  a  creature  no  one  ever  saw  except 
in  vision  ;  but  we  have  all  seen  the  head,  the  lion  and 
the  wings  —  the  parts  of  which  it  is  composed.  Even 
the  Revelator's  dream  of  the  city  of  God  coming 
down  out  of  heaven  was  made  up  of  the  real  earthly 
factors  of  gold,  and  jewels,  and  glass,  and  trees,  and 
rivers,  and  light.  You  cannot  expect  the  young  man, 
then,  to  dream  of  anything  more  ethereal  or  spiritual. 
He  will  dream  of   a  paradise  indeed;  but  if   he  is 


WEALTH.  121 


healthy  and  human,  his  paradise  will  be  on  the 
ground,  and  all  its  glory  will  be  constructed  of  earthly 
and  human  materials. 

Let  us  take  our  place  by  his  side  for  a  little  as  he 
stands  on  the  boundary  line  that  separates  the  boy 
from  the  man.  He  is  looking  up  the  long  vista  of 
years  that  seems  to  open  almost  endless  reaches  into 
the  unexplored  regions  and  possibilities  of  manhood. 
To  his  fancy  the  changing  clouds  of  the  future  take 
on  all  the  varying  shapes  of  his  grand  ambitions. 

T^e  Dream  of  Home. 

He  sees  a  home.  No  man  is  naturally  a  vagabond. 
I  do  not  believe  the  healthy  young  man  ever  lived 
whose  fancy  looked  forward  and  painted  on  the 
horizon  of  the  future,  as  the  goal  and  spring  of  his  high 
hopes,  a  bachelor  boarding-house.  Young  men  do 
not  dream  about  nor  get  enthusiastic  over  empty 
rooms.  If  a  man  finds  himself  at  forty  a  forlorn  and 
lonely  bachelor,  you  may  be  sure  it  was  not  because 
he  planned  for  and  intended  it.  Whatever  may  be 
true  of  those  who  marry,  you  may  be  quite  sure 
there  is  a  hidden  tragedy  somewhere  in  the  history 
of  those  who  do  not.  Nature  is  not  thwarted  with- 
out a  cause. 

The  young  man  then  dreams  of  a  home.  And  of 
course  he  dreams  of  a  beautiful  one.     It  is  broad  and 


122  LIFE  QUESTIONS. 

open  and  free.  The  wide  floors  are  soft  with  carpets. 
The  corners  and  halls  and  stairways  are  ornamented 
with  statuary  and  reminiscences  of  far-off  lands. 
The  walls  are  hung  with  pictures.  And  in  the  midst 
of  all,  that  for  which  it  exists,  and  which  constitutes 
its  soul  and  gives  it  meaning,  there  stand  wife  and 
child,  rich  in  their  own  fair  beauty  and  the  robing  of 
beautiful  garments. 

And  as  the  young  man  gazes  on  his  dream,  he  says, 
"To  realize  this,  I  must  have  money."  Money  is  the 
condition  of  bringing  his  vision  out  of  the  clouds  and 
making  it  rest  upon  the  ground  so  that  he  can  enter 
it  with  his  material  feet.  Is  he  not  justified,  then,  in 
wishing  to  become  rich  .''  I  believe  he  is  ;  for  I  think 
everyone  should  desire  and  seek  for  as  beautiful  a 
home  as  he  can  build. 

T/te  Dream  of  Position. 

But,  looking  up  the  dreamland  vista  of  years,  he 
sees  another  vision.  It  is  one  of  the  primal  instincts 
of  human  nature  to  desire  the  good  opinion,  the 
esteem,  the  admiration  of  our  fellow  men.  It  fre- 
quently degenerates  into  snobbery,  the  wish  to  exult 
over  those  below  us,  to  see  them  turn  yellow  and 
green  with  envy  and  jealousy  and  spite  because  of 
our  superior  good  fortune.  But  it  is  healthy  and 
noble  to  desire  that  others  should  think  well  of  us ; 


WEALTH. 


121 


and  to  attain  such  a  position  that  men  will  look  to  us 
for  guidance,  for  sympathy  and  help.  Every  young 
man,  then,  naturally  and  rightly  looks  forward  to  the 
attainment  of  social  position.  And,  in  this  country, 
where  there  is  no  hereditary  rank,  the  making  of 
money  looks  like  the  straightest  and  simplest  way  of 
gaining  such  position.  He  sees  that  the  man  of 
wealth  is  immediately  lifted  up  on  a  pedestal  of  pop- 
ular respect  and  favor.  And,  unless  he  is  made  of 
finer  stuff  than  that  which  constitutes  the  grain  of  our 
common  human  nature,  he  will  strike  at  once  for  this 
readiest  means  of  social  ascent,  without  waiting  long 
to  find  out  if  there  is  a  better  way. 

The  Political  Dream. 

And  then  there  is  the  dream  of  political  place  and 
power.  And,  as  things  are  to-day  in  our  republic,  he 
will  not  study  the  problem  long  before  he  will  con- 
clude that  money  is  a  stronger  political  force  than 
character  or  brains.  Most  official  doors  will  open 
their  locks  at  the  touch  of  a  golden  key.  He  will 
see  senators  at  Washington  whose  sole  claim  to 
honor  and  power  would  appear  to  be  a  Pacific  Slope 
bonanza.  And  he  will  notice  that  railroad  magnates 
can  carry  whole  legislatures  about  in  their  pockets. 
Here  in  Massachusetts  he  might  discover  that  the 
one  man  who  is  hungriest  for  the  governor's  chair  is 


124  -^-^^^    QUESTIONS. 

more  to  be  feared  because  of  his  plethoric  bank 
account  than  for  either  his  tongue,  his  shrewdness  or 
his  learning. 

Is  it  strange,  then,  that  his  dream  shows  him  that 
the  foundations  of  his  political  temple  are  constructed 
of  gold  and  precious  stones  ?  The  stairways  in  his 
vision  are  naturally  gilded. 

T/ie  Dream  of  Travel. 

Another  dream  in  the  hearts  of  us  all  in  these  days 
is  a  picture  of  foreign  travel.  The  Bible  has  been 
familiar  to  us  from  childhood  ;  and  across  its  fields 
walk  saintly  and  heroic  forms  in  foreign  costumes 
and  with  foreign  air.  Strange  rivers  flow  across  its 
landscapes,  and  strange  mountains  lift  themselves  in 
its  far-off  atmosphere.  Our  Latin  and  Greek  have 
made  Athens  and  Rome  a  part  of  our  fancy  world. 
The  myth-haunted  Rhine  winds  through  a  land  of 
poetry  and  romance.  Paris  is  a  fairy  city  to  one  who 
has  never  visited  it.  And  England,  to  an  American, 
is  like  a  dream  of  the  old  home.  Sometime  we  all 
think  we  will  realize  these  scenes.  We  will  really 
walk  in  these  wonderlands.  The  "Arabian  Nights" 
tells  us  of  the  magic  tapestry,  on  which,  if  one  sat 
and  wished,  he  was  instantly  carried  wherever  he 
desired  to  be.  Our  magic  tapestry  is  woven  of 
yellow   gold.     With   a  gold  piece   in   our   hand,   all 


WEALTH. 


125 


lands,  and  museums,  and  picture  galleries,  and  pal- 
aces, fly  open  at  our  approach  and  give  us  cordial 
welcome. 

Again,  then,  I  ask,  is  it  any  wonder  that  young 
men  say  to  themselves,  "  I  will  seek  out  the  path 
that  leads  to  wealth  ? " 

Go/d  ^^  the  Stuff  that  Dreams  are  Made  of'\ 

And,  in  general,  the  3'oung  man's  dream  ot  happi- 
ness is  almost  always  one  for  the  realization  of  which 
gold  is  a  prime  condition.  Houses,  and  lands,  and 
horses,  and  pictures,  and  works  of  art,  and  libraries, 
and  society,  and  travel  —  even  if  he  have  no  ignoble 
dreams  —  these  are  things  that  cost,  and  that  only 
value  can  buy.  And  if  our  dreams  are  of  education 
and  a  literary,  scientific,  and  philanthropic  career, 
still,  again,  money  is  sorely  needed  to  enable  one  to 
get  on  toward  the  goal. 

The  young  man  at  first  naturally  looks  outward, 
and  only  appreciates  at  its  full  value  tangible  things 
and  tangible  pleasures  such  as  money  is  able  to  pro- 
cure. It  is  only  later,  if  at  all,  that  he  enters  the 
inner  realms  of  thought  and  feeling,  where  the  soul 
hides  away  her  treasures  that  cannot  be  weighed  in 
scales,  and  that  cannot  be  measured  in  dollars.  It  is 
natural,  then,  that  the  temple  of  human  happiness 
should  appear  to  his  dreams  as  gilded,  and  that  the 


126  LIFE    QUESTIONS. 


god  of  happiness  should  seem  to  be  Plutus,  the  god 
of  wealth. 

Wealth  a  Good  Thing. 

And  —  it  is  time  for  the  pulpit  to  own  it  frankly  — 
wealth  is  a  good  thing.  Or,  to  speak  with  precise 
accuracy  of  thought  and  language,  wealth  in  itself 
cannot  be  said  to  be  either  good  or  evil.  It  is  simply 
force ;  and,  like  the  lightning,  or  the  sunlight,  or  the 
ocean,  it  withers  or  nourishes,  smites  or  runs  errands 
for  us,  devastates  or  fertilizes  accordingly  as  it  is 
understood  or  used.  If  it  is  not  good  in  itself,  it  is 
the  condition  of  almost  all  good.  It  is  the  lever  by 
which  the  race  has  been  lifted  from  barbarism  to 
civilization.  So  long  as  the  race  could  do  nothing 
but  barely  live,  man  was  of  necessity  only  an  animal 
who  hunted  and  fought  for  his  prey,  hungrily  devoured 
it,  and  then,  like  a  gorged  tiger,  slept.  When  the 
race  began  to  think,  and  plan,  and  save  for  to-morrow, 
it  first  began  to  be  human.  And  there  is  not  a  single 
feature  of  our  civilization  to-day  that  has  not  sprung 
out  of  money,  and  that  does  not  depend  on  money 
for  its  continuance. 

Evils  of  Poverty. 

And,  on  the  other  hand,  more  of  the  crime,  and 
sin,  and  sorrow  of  the  world  than  I  can  now  stay  to 


WEALTH.  127 


point  out,  spring,  like  poisonous  weeds,  out  of  the 
dark,  tear-watered  and  blood-wet  soil  of  poverty, 
"  Blessed  are  the  poor  ?  "  No  ;  as  a  general  thing, 
cursed  are  the  poor  !  So  long  as  a  man  can  get 
honest  bread,  he  is  not,  in  the  worst  sense,  poor. 
But  how  many  there  are  who  cannot.  How  many 
steal  for  a  piece  of  bread.  How  many  a  poor  girl 
has  sold  her  virtue  to  appease  the  pangs  of  her 
hunger.  How  much  misery  did  Hood  give  pathetic 
utterance  to  in  his  famous  "  Song  of  the  Shirt " — 

"  O,  God,  that  bread  should  be  so  dear, 
And  flesh  and  blood  so  cheap ! " 

How  many  generous  plans,  and  brilliant  hopes,  and 
noble  aspirations  have  died  in  bud  for  lack  of  a  little 
sunshine  of  prosperity.  Of  how  many  lives  of  unful- 
filled promise  did  Gray  sing  in  his  elegy  when  he 

said  — 

"  Chill  penury  repressed  their  noble  rage, 

And  froze  the  genial  current  of  the  soul." 

It  is  not  an  evil  thing  when  a  man  has  to  work 
hard  and  struggle  to  get  on ;  but  it  is  an  evil,  and  a 
bitter  one,  when  he  utterly  fails  to  get  on,  notwith- 
standing his  struggle. 

Wealth  sometimes  too  Dear. 

But,  while  it  is  true  that  money  is  not  only  a 
proper   object  of   search,   but    is    even   a  necessary 


128  LIFE  QUESTIONS. 

condition  of  almost  all  that  is  best  in  our  civilization, 
still  it  is  possible  to  buy  it  at  too  high  a  price.  Many- 
things  are  desirable  that  yet  one  cannot  afford  to  buy. 
And  there  are  some  things  you  cannot  afford  to  pay, 
even  for  money.  The  old  proverb-writer  says,  and 
says  with  wondrous  subtlety  and  wisdom,  "  There  is 
that  scattereth  and  yet  increaseth  ;  and  there  is  that 
withholdeth  more  than  is  meet,  but  it  tendeth  to  pov- 
erty." A  man  may  pay  out  so  large  a  part  of  his 
manhood  for  money  that  when  he  has  got  the  money 
he  is  an  exceedingly  poor  and  small  type  of  man. 

Let  us,  then,  look  at  a  few  things  that  one  cannot 
afford  to  pay,  even  for  the  grand  prize  of  wealth. 

.End  higher  than  Means. 

You  cannot  afford  to  pay  the  price  of  sacrificing 
the  end  to  the  means. 

A  hill  of  gold,  for  its  own  sake  and  as  an  end  in 
itself,  is  of  no  more  worth  than  a  hill  of  pudding- 
stone.  Money  is  not  a  home,  nor  social  position,  nor 
political  power,  nor  travel,  nor  art,  nor  science,  nor 
good,  nor  happiness  in  any  form.  A  hundred  acres 
of  soil  are  not  wheat,  nor  corn,  nor  flowers,  nor  trees 
—  neither  a  garden  nor  a  park.  It  is  simply  the  raw 
material,  out  of  which  these  may  be  produced ;  the 
condition  from  which  these  may  be  developed.  But 
the  land  unused,  uncultivated,  unproducti\*e,  is  not 


WEALTH.  129 

worth  its  taxes.  ,  So  a  heap  of  money  is  not  wealth, 
well-being,  good.  It  is  only  the  soil  in  which  fine 
things  may  be  made  to  grow ;  it  is  the  condition  of 
infinite  uses,  if  only  one  knows  how  to  use. 

This,  abstractly  stated,  is  the  general  principle, 
that  the  further  points  I  make  will  serve  to  illustrate. 

Honesty  better  than  Money. 

You  cannot  afford  to  buy  money  at  the  price  of 
honesty. 

A  rich  man  is  made  up  of  two  factors,  though  it  is 
a  popular  fallacy  that  he  can  be  complete  with  only 
one.  A  rich  man  is  not  only  rich,  he  is  also  a  man. 
But  he  who  buys  the  riches  at  the  price  of  his  honesty 
has  ceased  to  be  a  man,  and  is  only  rich.  Is  this 
language  too  strong .-'  Look  and  see.  Honesty, 
integrity,  is  the  very  core,  heart,  centre,  prime  princi- 
ple, foundation-stone  of  manhood.  There  is  no  man, 
in  the  true,  high  sense  of  the  word,  without  it.  What- 
ever high  human  society  exists  on  earth  exists  by 
virtue  of  what  there  is  of  honesty,  integrity.  This  is 
the  one  bond  that  holds  the  world  together.  Just 
think  a  moment.  There  is  a  force  that  we  name  the 
centripetal,  that  holds  the  world  together.  There  is 
another  force  that  we  name  centrifugal,  that  tends  to 
fling  off  its  parts  into  space.  If  the  centripetal  were 
not  in  the  majority  the  old  earth  would  burst  like  a 

9 


130  LIFE  QUESTIONS. 

soap-bubble,  and  vanish  like  a  wreck  at  sea,  scatter- 
ing its  fragments  over  the  infinite  deep.  Now,  the 
force  that  holds  together  our  human  world  of  men 
and  women  is  so  much  of  mutual  trust  as  we  have  in 
each  other's  truth  and  honesty.  Take  this  all  away, 
and  civilization  would  burst  in  fragments  like  an 
exploded  planet.  The  lack  of  honesty  is  the  cause 
of  all  the  disorder  that  exists.  That  there  is  any 
society  at  all  is  because  so  large  an  amount  of  hon- 
esty exists  ;  and  society  advances  just  in  proportion 
as  the  world  grows  in  integrity.  He,  then,  who 
becomes  dishonest  has  ceased  to  be  on  the  side  of 
humanity,  is  an  enemy  of  and  a  traitor  to  the  race. 
He  is  not  man  ;  he  is  anti-man.  He  has  forfeited 
that  by  which  the  world  lives  :  and  is  self-exiled  from 
what  is  the  noblest  quality  of  his  kind. 

To  be  a  rich  man,  then,  you  must  not  only  be  rich, 
but  be  a  man.  And  man,  in  its  highest  sense,  means 
honesty.  Do  I  not  say  well,  then,  when  I  assert  that, 
for  the  sake  of  money,  you  cannot  afford  to  pay  so 
high  a  price  as  honesty  .-• 

And  yet,  to  what  an  awful  strain  of  temptation  is  a 
young  man  submitted,  when  he  sees  money,  itself, 
itself  and  alone,  crowned  with  honor  and  placed  on  a 
throne  of  power  and  influence,  while  the  man  who 
clutches  it  is  only  a  rotten-hearted  shell. 


WEALTH.  131 


Home  better  than  Money. 

Another  thing  you  cannot  afford  to  pay  for  money, 
is  home. 

More  or  less  of  money  is  needed  to  create  an  ideal 
home;  but  money  alone  can  not  do  it.  When  you 
have  bought  a  house,  and  furnished  it  richly,  and  put 
your  wife  and  children  in  it,  you  have  not  necessarily 
created  a  home.  A  pile  of  roots  and  trunk  and 
branches  and  leaves  is  not  necessarily  a  tree.  Order, 
arrangement  after  an  ideal  pattern,  and  then,  above 
all,  life  —  these  are  required  to  make  a  tree.  So  a  pile 
of  things  isn't  a  house;  it  is  essentially  a  spirit,  a  life. 
A  house  without  a  soul  is  not  a  home,  any  more  than 
a  body  without  a  soul  is  a  man  ;  it  is  only  a  corpse. 

You  must  put  your  soul,  then,  the  sweetest  flavor 
and  essence  of  your  life,  into  the  house  before  it  can 
be  called  a  home.  And  if  a  body  be  dead,  it  does  not 
put  life  into  it  to  dress  it  out  sumptuously.  So  a 
costly  house  and  luxurious  furnishings  are  no  substi- 
tutes for  soul  in  the  home. 

But  such  a  mistake  as  this  —  if  my  observation  be 
not  at  fault  —  is  not  at  all  an  uncommon  one. 

And  in  another  way  men  make  a  disastrous  sacri- 
fice. Forgetting  that  money  is  only  a  means  to  the 
making  of  a  home  —  this  is  one  of  the  highest  ends 
of   every   true    life  —  they   become   so   absorbed   in 


132  LIFE    QUESTIONS. 

money-getting  that  they  leave  no  time  for  anything 
like  home  life.  As  though  one  should  lay  up  money 
for  the  express  purpose  of  taking  a  journey,  and  then 
get  so  busy  about  getting  ready  as  never  to  go.  I 
beseech  you  not  to  turn  home  into  a  restaurant  and  a 
sleeping-bunk ;  spending  all  your  leisure  somewhere 
else,  and  going  home  only  when  "all  the  other  places 
are  shut  up." 

Culture  better  than  Money. 

Again,  heart  culture  and  head  culture  are  too 
great  a  price  to  pay  for  wealth. 

I  am  aware  that  money  is  a  needful  condition  to 
one  of  these,  if  not  to  both;  and  yet  money  is  not 
good  enough  to  take  the  place  of  either.  The  end  of 
life,  for  this  world,  is  living ;  and  living,  in  any  true 
sense  of  the  word,  includes  love  and  thought.  Living 
means  an  open  and  cultivated  ear  that  can  bring  one 
into  vital  contact  with  the  music,  the  beautiful  sounds 
of  the  world;  making  one  capable  of  simple,  pure 
human  joy  in  the  murmur  of  sea-waves,  the  sough  of 
winds  in  tree-tops,  the  bird-songs,  the  child-laughter, 
the  happy-insect  hum,  the  hurly-burly  of  the  world's 
rushing  life.  Living  means  an  open  eye  that  can  stop 
to  notice  the  glory  in  sky-tints  and  cloud  pictures, 
the  changing  sheen  of  waters,  the  color  of  a  rose,  the 
blush  of  a  peach,  the  outline  of  a  beautiful  face,  the 
deep  heaven  of  a  loving  eye,  as  well  as  the  outlines 


WEALTH. 


133 


and  forms  and  shadings  of  landscapes,  and  mountains, 
and  pictures,  and  marbles.  Living  means  an  open 
heart  that,  like  an  vEolian  harp  breathed  on  by  the 
winds,  is  responsive  to  every  whisper  of  human  life 
or  fortune,  and  echoes  back  in  sympathy  all  the 
moods  of  human  hope  or  fear.  Living  means  a  brain 
that  can  think ;  that,  unlike  the  moles  that  burrow  in 
the  ground,  climbs  intellectual  heights,  and  "  looks 
before  and  after;"  that  asks  questions  of  the  universe, 
that  considers,  and  is  awe-struck  by  the  mystery  of 
the  world,  that  comprehends  something  —  beyond 
eating  and  drinking  —  of  how  wonderful  and  infinite 
a  thing  is  this  universal  life,  of  which  we  are  a  part. 

A  Man  or  Three  Dollars. 

Now  all  this  you  cannot  afford  to  give  up  for  a 
little  more  of  money,  which  after  all  is  of  value  only 
as  it  helps  you  to  gain  this.  A  friend  was  telling  me, 
the  other  day,  of  an  old  merchant  who  had  become  a 
millionaire.  A  gentleman  called  on  him  one  day, 
and  found  him  in  overalls  and  an  old  soiled  frock 
rolling  a  cask  of  sugar  across  the  floor.  He  expostu- 
lated with  him  for  spending  his  time  that  way,  now 
that  he  was  so  rich.  But  the  old  man  replied :  "  Do 
you  know  you  are  not  very  wise  to  find  fault  with  me 
for  what  I  am  doing }  The  fact  of  the  matter  is,  you 
ought  to  know,  that  I  don't  know  how  to  do  anything 


134  LIFE    QUESTIONS. 


else,  and  haven't  any  taste  for  anything  else.  I  've 
just  made  three  dollars  on  this  barrel  of  sugar,  and 
you  'd  take  away  from  me  the  only  pleasure  that  is 
left  me  that  I  can  appreciate."  The  old  man  was 
right.  Ixt  him  go  on  rolling  his  sugar  barrel.  But, 
after  all,  isn't  it  a  pity  that  a  man,  a  son  of  God, 
living  under  this  wondrous  dome  of  heaven,  bright 
with  sun,  curtained  with  clouds,  pillared  by  moun- 
tains, gemmed  with  stars  that  are  only  lamps  along 
avenues  leading  to  infinity,  living  on  this  old  earth, 
with  a  rock-record  of  millions  of  past  years  right 
under  his  feet,  whose  surface  is  covered  with  ruins 
and  monuments  that  whisper  their  wonder  stories  of 
buried  civilizations,  that  is  crowded  with  mystery  and 
marvel,  beautiful  with  trees,  rivers  and  lakes  that 
copy  the  upper  heavens,  living  in  the  midst  of  men 
and  women  by  whom  is  played  an  age-long  comedy 
of  laughter,  or  tragedy  of  tears  with  angels  for  spec- 
tators ;  isn't  it  an  infinite  pity,  I  say,  that  a  man  so 
situated,  should,  for  the  sake  of  a  little  more  money, 
have  so  stunted  and  warped  and  narrowed  down  his 
life  that  the  only  thing  he  could  be  interested  in 
should  be  making  three  dollars  on  a  barrel  of  sugar  .<' 

Young  men  start  out  in  life  with  the  purpose  of 
getting  rich  with,  always  in  mind,  the  after  and 
superior  purpose  of  happiness.  But  they  forget  to 
feed  and  sharpen  the  faculties  and  powers  that  can 
bring  them  into  vital  contact  with  the  best  things  in 


WEALTH.  135 

life ;  and  so  at  last  they  wake  up  to  find  they  are  like 
one  who  should  work  and  save  money  to  pay  his 
entrance  fee  to  a  musical  concert,  but  by  the  time  it 
is  saved  discovers  that  he  is  deaf  and  cannot  hear. 
Keep  yourselves  alive  and  fresh  and  open  and  young, 
and  then  if  you  get  money,  you  will  be  capable  of 
using  it. 

Doing  Good  as  you  Go. 

Another  thing  I  must  hint.  For  the  sake  of  saving 
do  not  sacrifice  the  pleasures  and  advantages  of  doing 
good  as  you  go  along.  Thousands  close  their  hands 
and  pockets  now,  with  the  impression  that  when  they 
get  rich  they  shall  find  pleasure  in  doing  good.  But 
doing  good  is  a  faculty  like  any  other  that  becomes 
weak,  atrophied,  palsied  for  lack  of  use.  You  might 
as  well  stop  practising  on  the  piano,  under  the 
impression  that  in  a  year  or  two,  you  '11  find  time 
to  give  a  whole  month  to  it.  In  the  meantime  you 
will  get  out  of  practice  and  lose  your  power.  Keep 
your  hand  and  your  pocket  open  or  they  will  grow 
together  so  that  nothing,  short  of  death's  finger,  can 
unloose  them;  and  that  will  be  that  loose  fingered 
heirs  may  scatter  the  treasures  you  coined  your 
heart  and  life  to  heap. 

Get  Money,  but — 
In  conclusion  then,  you  may  rightly  try   to  accu- 


136  LIFE  QUESTIONS. 

mulate  money  ;  only  remember  it  is  accursed  if  you  do 
it  at  the  price  of  the  welfare  or  rights  of  others,  or  of 
your  own  higher  self.  It  is  turning  life  topsy-turvy 
to  sacrifice  the  end  to  the  m^eans. 

But  when  a  man  has  accumulated,  let  him  ever  be 
mindful  that  he  has  no  right  to  hold  it  selfishly  for 
his  own  amusement.  He  has  nothing  that  has  not 
been  given  him.  His  health,  his  brain,  his  special 
capacity,  these  he  has  inherited,  they  are  a  gift  of 
humanity.  The  conditions  of  the  world,  social,  politi- 
cal, commercial,  that  have  enabled  him  to  accumulate, 
these  are  a  gift  of  humanity.  All  he  has,  then,  he 
owes ;  and  the  sacred  duty  is  on  him  to  use  for  the 
good  of  man.  Make  of  your  money  a  golden  lever, 
with  which,  as  best  you  can,  to  lift  the  world. 

Rank  of  Money-Maker. 

And  remember,  also,  not  to  develop  an  over-ween- 
ing pride  in  your  power  as  a  money-maker.  It  is  a 
legitimate  power  and  an  important  one.  But  many  a 
man  who  has  no  faculty  for  making  money,  may  yet 
possess  a  power  of  another  kind  quite  as  manly  and 
still  more  beneficent.  He  who  can  make  the  world 
think,  love  and  live  nobly ;  such  an  one,  though  no 
money-maker  or  money-keeper,  may  still  be  one  that 
the  money-maker  should  be  glad  to  hold  up,  while  he 
does  a  higher  and  nobler  work.     By  helping  on  such 


WEALTH. 


137 


men  as  these,  you  may  become  partakers  with  them 
of  their  service,  and  the  glory  of  their  achievements. 
And  even  though  one  be  only  able  to  build  a 
simple  home,  and  lead  a  quiet,  simple  life  —  if  it  be 
pure,  and  thoughtful,  and  loving,  and  intelligent  — 
remember  that  this  is  the  best  thing  earth  has  for  us 
after  all.  Tha-t  manhood  is  first.  If  money  helps  it, 
blessed  be  money.  But  if  the  money  be  absent  and 
the  manhood  be  there,  then  the  money  may  best  be 
spared,  for — 

"  A  man 's  a  man  for  a'  that." 


HOW    HIGH    IS    THE    RANK    OF    LOVE? 


All  Saved  if  Love  be  itot  Lost. 

Let  us  picture  to  ourselves  a  grand  ship  at  sea, 
with  all  sails  set,  speeding  happily  and  beautifully 
before  the  wind.  Her  captain,  in  his  old  age,  has 
risked  in  her  the  accumulations  of  a  life  time.  He 
has,  beside,  only  his  little  child,  the  image  and  re- 
minder of  her  who  has  faded  out  of  his  arms  and 
become  a  visitor  only  in  his  dreams.  He  is  returning 
from  a  foreign  country  to  his  own  home.  This  is 
the  last  voyage  of  his  life.  A  storm  comes  up,  the 
rudder  is  broken,  and  the  ship  blown  upon  the  break- 
ers ;  everything  is  going  to  pieces,  his  life  work 
wrecked  before  his  eyes.  The  boats  are  lowered,  and 
swamped  in  the  sea.  But  the  captain,  forgetting 
everything  else,  clasps  the  little  fair-haired  girl,  which 
to  him  is  more  than  ship,  cargo,  life,  and  all,  in  his 
arms,  and  flings  himself  into  the  sea,  and  after 
battling  with  the  waves,  at  last  drifts  upon  the  sand, 
battered  and  bruised,  but  still  clinging  to  his  little 


LOVE.  j^Q 

child,  from  whom  all  life  seems  to  have  departed. 
But  using  all  the  restoratives  which  his  skill  and 
experience  can  suggest,  at  last  she  breathes  and 
opens  her  eyes  again ;  and  although  everything  else 
has  gone,  do  you  not  believe  that  the  old  man  would 
clasp  the  little  child  to  his  heart,  with  thanksgiving 
to  God,  feeling  that  everything  was  saved,  since  she 
could  look  into  his  eyes  once  more  ? 

T/i^   World-voyage. 

I  sometimes  think  of  this  old  earth  as  a  ship,  with 
its  passengers,  out  sailing  across  an  infinite  deep. 
The  word  planet,  as  perhaps  you  are  aware,  means 
simply  a  wanderer ;  because  to  the  eyes  of  the  first 
astronomers,  while  the  stars  seemed  to  keep  their 
places,  the  planets  wandered  back  and  forth  across 
the  face  of  heaven.  The  earth,  then,  is  a  ship  sailing 
across  the  deep  of  the  upper  sky,  from  what  port  we 
know  not,  to  what  port  we  can  only  conjecture.  But 
we  find  reason  to  believe  that  there  is  wisdom  and 
love  at  the  helm ;  and  if  indeed  God  has  made  us  in 
his  own  image,  if  love  in  us  is  the  reflection  of  his 
love,  then  we  must  believe  that  God,  as  he  looks  over 
the  universe,  cares  comparatively  little  for  the  hulks 
of  planets  and  worlds,  cares  very  little  for  mountains, 
for  continents,  for  oceans,  for  clouds,  for  skies,  but 
cares  most  of  all  for  the  love  of  childish  human  hearts, 


140 


LIFE    QUESTIONS. 


that  look  up  to  him  and  give  thanks,  however  feeble 
and  poor  the  expression.  And  we  must  believe  that 
though  the  earth  were  wrecked,  though  it  should 
burst  out  with  flame  some  day  —  astronomers  say  it 
is  possible  —  and  though  all  should  be  on  fire,  and 
the  rising  flames  should  eat  up  the  clouds  and  the 
atmosphere,  and  even  seem  to  lick  the  stars  from  the 
surface  of  heaven,  and  there  only  be  left  ashes  falling 
in  silence  in  silent  space,  still,  man  —  his  child  —  and 
the  love  of  the  human  heart  would  be  the  one  thing 
that  all  the  universe  was  for ;  and  if  these  be  saved, 
God  himself  would  count  the  universe  no  loss.  For 
love  is  the  one  thing  for  which  the  universe  exists,  for 
which  worlds  exist,  for  which  stars  shine  and  planets 
circle  about  them.  Love  and  the  happiness  which 
comes  from  love,  is  the  end,  the  object,  the  crown  of 
life.  This  is  my  theme,  my  proposition,  which  I 
propose  to  go  on  and  illustrate. 

All  for  Love. 

I  have  talked  to  you  a  great  deal,  first  and  last, 
about  thought,  about  study,  about  reading,  about 
science,  about  laws,  about  all  these  things  which 
make  up  the  external  part  of  life.  And  yet  I  have 
had  it  in  my  mind  always,  and  I  wish  you  would  bear 
it  in  your  mind  always,  that  all  these  things  are  for 
love,  these  only  mean  love,  the  end  and  crown  of  all ; 


LOVE.  141 

these  are  of  worth  only  as  they  minister  to  and  nourish 
love.    If  you  trace  back  this  old  earth  toward  the  fire 
mist,  millions  and  millions  of  years  ago,  and  follow 
the  course  of   this  whirling  cloud  of    nebulae,  fling- 
ing off  ring  after  ring,  to  become  planets,  to  circle 
around  that,  which,  in  after  ages,  shall  become  the 
centre ;  trace  it  all  down  through,  it  has  no  interest 
for  us,  it  could  by  no  possibility  have  any  interest 
for  us,   unless  we  knew  that   we  were   starting   at 
the  fountain  head  of  a  stream  that  was  to  bear  us 
on  to  a  land  that  was  to  be  the  abode  of  sentient 
creatures  that  could  feel  and  could  love ;  that  is  the 
end  and  the  only  justification  of  it  all.     The  laws  of 
chemical  attraction,  those  marvellous  laws  of  crystal- 
lization, that  create  all  the  beautiful  forms  of   the 
inorganic  world  beneath  us,  are  of  interest  to  us  only 
because  they  are  leading  the  world  toward,  and  are 
the  prophecy  of,  the  beginning  of   an  organization 
that  in  some  degree  can  feel. 

Tke  Bird's  Nest. 

And,  forgetting  for  a  moment  that  man  is  the 
highest  creature  on  earth,  let  us  raise  the  question 
as  to  what  is  the  highest  form  of  life  beneath  us,  that 
is,  that  which  comes  nearest  to  the  heart  of  man  ? 
Trace  all  the  way  up  from  the  beginning  of  feeling, 
the   least   possibility  of   a  sensation,  to  that  which 


142  LIFE  QUESTIONS. 

comes  nearest  to  us  ;  that  which  lives  forever  in  the 
MTorld's  heart  of  song,  of  poetry,  of  romance,  of  child- 
memory,  of  old  age,  is  so  simple  a  thing  as  a  bird's 
nest.  It  is  sung  by  all  the  poets.  I  remember  just 
now  two  or  three  beautiful  lines  of  Shelley.  He  has 
personified  the  earth,  and  represents  her  as  a  figure 
dancing  about  the  sun.  Making  his  cloud  speak,  he 
says  : 

From  my  wings  are  shaken  the  dews  that  waken 

The  sweet  birds,  every  one, 
When  rocked  to  rest  on  their  Mother's  breast. 

As  she  dances  about  the  sun. 

And  you  remember  those  beautiful  lines  of  Mr. 
Lowell's.  In  that  wonderful  picture  of  Spring,  he 
says: 

The  little  bird  sits  at  his  door  in  the  sun, 
Atilt,  like  a  blossom  among  the  leaves. 
And  lets  his  illumined  being  o'errun 
With  the  deluge  of  summer  it  receives. 
His  mate  feels  the  eggs  beneath  her  wings, 
And  the  dumb  heart  within  her  ilutters  and  sings. 
He  sings  to  the  wide  world,  and  she  to  her  nest ; 
In  the  nice  ear  of  nature,  which  song  is  the  best  ? 

A  bird's  nest  at  the  door  of  our  childhood  home  is 
the  one  thing,  it  seems  to  me,  that  represents  that 
which  is  most  beautiful,  most  poetic,  most  touching, 
most  meaning  in  all  the  lower  life  of  the  world.  And 
why  have  I  spoken  of  it  and  pictured  it  thus  to-day  ? 
Because,  until  you  reach  the  level  of  human  hearts, 
the  highest,  finest,  and  most  beautiful  expression  of 


LOVE.  143 

life,  and  that  which  comes  closest  to  the  human 
heart,  that  which  represents  that  which  is  central  in 
human  life,  the  father  care,  the  mother  brooding  love, 
the  watchfulness  of  the  feeble  callow  young,  the 
training,  the  tenderness  in  their  first  efforts  to  fly,  all 
this  comes  so  near  to  what  we  mean  by  the  word 
home,  that  we  substitute  the  one  word  for  the  other ; 
and  the  young  man,  poetically,  beautifully,  talks  of 
building  a  nest  for  his  love,  when  to  speak  prosaically 
he  expresses  the  purpose  of  building  himself  a  house 
and  making  it  a  home.  Come  now  then  to  human 
life  and  see  how  true  this  is,  a  principle  all  pervasive 
and  central  in  human  thought  and  endeavor. 

Love  in  Literature. 

If  you  wish  to  get  a  permanent,  age-long  expres- 
sion of  what  men  think,  and  hope,  and  fear,  and  feel, 
I  have  already  told  you  that  you  must  look  at  what 
the  world  calls  its  literature.  Let  us  glance  over  a 
few  specimens  of  that,  and  see  the  position  that  love 
occupies  in  the  literature  of  the  world.  Go  back 
first  to  old  Homer  ;  take  up  his  Iliad,  and  you  find 
that  the  main-spring  and  motive  of  it  is  love.  Love 
is  its  brightness  ;  and  love  thwarted,  perverted  and 
depraved,  is  the  power  that  works  its  desolation ;  and 
it  is  the  flame  of  love,  at  last,  that  wraps  in  ruin  the 
towers  of  the  city  of  Ilium  itself.      And   the  most 


144  ^^^^  QUESTIONS. 

beautiful  picture,  perhaps,  in  all  ancient  literature,  is 
the  picture  of  the  old  warrior,  Hector,  who  with- 
draws from  the  fight,  and  goes  into  the  city  for  a 
moment's  release,  and  seeks  for  his  wife  and  his  little 
boy.  The  child  is  afraid,  and  shrinks  and  cries  at 
the  sight  of  the  black  horse -hair  plume  upon  his 
helmet ;  and  then  stooping  to  the  tenderness  of  his 
little  boy,  he  takes  his  helmet  off,  lays  it  aside,  and 
then  the  little  boy  comes  jumping  and  laughing  to 
his  arms,  and  he  tosses  him,  plays  with  him  a 
moment,  gives  him  back  to  his  mother,  puts  his 
helmet  on  again,  and  goes  back  to  the  field.  Love 
is  the  centre  of  it  all. 

Take  the  Odyssey  :  the  central  figure  there  is  the 
faithful  wife  Penelope,  ever  true  and  loyal,  while  her 
husband  wanders,  driven  by  the  winds  and  by  fate 
all  over  the  world  for  ten  long  years,  seeking  her 
who  has  been  faithful  to  him  for  a  generation.  Come 
down  from  that  time  to  Petrarch.  The  central  thought 
of  Petrarch's  work  is  love.  Take  Dante  :  from  the 
lowest  hell  up  through  purgatory  into  heaven,  until 
the  red  passion  of  human  love,  purified,  flames  into 
the  white  heat  of  the  divine  —  everywhere,  the  one 
word  that  binds  it  together  and  gives  it  meaning  is 
this  central  word  of  the  world's  heart,  love.  Come 
down  to  the  days  of  Shakspeare :  all  the  grand 
pictures  of  comedy  and  tragedy,  the  personages  that 
he  has  created  are  only  beings  that  love  and  hate ; 


LOVE. 


145 


and  their  glory  or  gloom  are  only  the  brightness  or 
shadows  of  human  love.  And  so  the  novels  of  the 
world.  When  you  think  over  those  that  you  have 
read,  what  is  it  th^.t  comes  to  mind  ?  It  is  Little 
Nell  and  her  grandfather  wandering  on  a  country 
road,  or  sitting  down  to  rest  under  a  tree.  It  is  this 
word  picture  of  some  type  of  human  affection,  which 
is  the  meaning  of  it  all.  It  is  no  accident  that  you 
always  expect  to  find  hero  and  heroine,  to  find  the 
meaning  of  any  great  book  of  the  world  turning  on 
the  relationship  in  which  we  stand  to  each  other. 
This  is  the  single  pivot  in  human  life,  and  all  things 
in  heaven  and  earth  revolve  around  it  of  necessity  — 
always  have,  do  now,  and  always  will,  until  human 
nature  is  radically  changed.  Mr.  William  Morris, 
the  English  poet,  has  written  a  book  entitled  "  Love 
is  Enough."  In  it  he  represents  a  great  king  leaving 
his  throne  and  his  dominions,  and  travelling  over  the 
world  in  search  of  a  perfect  love  somewhere  ;  and 
when  he  has  found  it,  he  cares  no  more  for  his 
dominions  or  his  power,  but  feels  that  love  is  enough 
to  fill  the  meaning,  to  round  out  the  beauty  and  be 
the  glory  of  life.  But  even  if  we  are  not  ready  to 
concede  that,  you  will  perforce,  if  you  study  the 
history  of  the  world,  concede  this  other  point,  that 
all  things  else,  without  love,  are  not  enough.  Take 
the  picture  of  such  a  life  as  Dean  Swift's,  the  might- 
iest man  of  his  time,  an  intellectual  emperor  of 
10 


146  LIFE    QUESTIONS. 


thought,  and  yet  a  man  whose  intimate  friend  said 
was  the  most  unhappy  man  on  the  face  of  the  earth. 
And  they  who  know  the  one  secret  of  his  life,  know 
that  it  was  simply  because  of  a  disappointed  hunger 
of  a  life  for  a  love  that  was  never  satisfied.  Take 
such  a  character  as  Queen  Elizabeth,  the  most  con- 
spicuous figure  in  Europe  during  her  mighty,  her 
long,  her  successful  reign.  She  studied  the  interests 
of  the  country,  planning  between  conflicting  parties. 
Catholic  and  Protestant.  She  was  wise  enough  to 
know  that  if  she  cast  in  her  lot  definitely  with  either 
the  one  or  the  other,  by  marrying  a  Catholic  or  Prot- 
estant, she  would  shatter  the  kingdom  into  atoms. 
Going  through  life  such  a  grand  queen,  she  was  yet 
heart -hungry  and  miserable,  carrying  to  her  grave 
the  one  sorrow  and  regret  of  her  reign,  that  she  was 
so  situated  she  could  not  marry  a  subject  whom  she 
loved.  Robert  Browning,  in  one  of  his  beautiful 
poems,  entitled  "  In  a  Balcony,"  has  represented  a 
queen  occupying  precisely  this  position.  Sitting  on 
a  pedestal,  worshipped  and  feared  on  the  part  of  all 
her  subjects,  and  yet  finding  no  human  love  ;  hunger- 
ing for  heart-satisfaction,  so  that  she  could  say  that 
if  one  of  her  halberdiers,  who  bows  in  awe  and  fear 
before  her  as  she  passed,  would  only  fling  aside  his 
weapon  and  clasp  her  feet,  she  would  thank  him  for 
very  love ;  because  she  desired  that  something  should 
come  near  to  her  and  take  away  this  terrible  icy  isola- 
tion and  lonely  grandeur. 


LOVE. 


147 


Love  is  Life. 

And  so  if  you  look  through  the  world,  what  will 
you  find  ?  You  will  find,  perhaps,  an  old  man  encased 
in  his  outer  crust  of  hardness  apparently,  so  that  you 
would  say  there  is  not  a  tender  fibre  in  his  being ; 
and  yet  if  you  know  him  through  and  through,  per- 
haps you  will  find  —  I  believe  that  you  will  always 
find  —  that  the  main-spring  of  his  activity  is  the  love 
for  some  one  living  or  a  memory^bf  one  that  is  dead. 
A  young  man  is  conscious  that  he  lives  for  love.  A 
middle-aged  man,  however  calm  and  cool  in  his  exte- 
rior he  may  have  become,  is  conscious  that  the  one 
main,  strong  and  motive  force  of  his  life  is  love. 
Then  hate  itself  is  only  love  turned  sour.  Even  the 
miser's  affection  for  his  gold  is  only  love,  disappointed 
in  its  main  outlook,  and  turning  to  something  else  to 
feed  its  insatiable  hunger. 

Sentiment  and  Sentimentality. 

There  is  a  vast  difference  between  what  we  call  sen- 
timent and  sentimentality.  Sentimentality  is  weak- 
ness ;  it  is  folly  ;  it  is  love  spoiled.  But  sentiment  is 
the  deepest  and  grandest  part  of  human  life,  that 
without  which  all  other  forces  become  weakness  and 
turn  to  nothing.     You  may  compare  sentimentality, 


148  LIFE    QUESTIONS. 


if  you  will,  to  steam  in  an  engine  as  it  stands  in  a 
depot  —  escaping,  hissing,  puffing  —  enveloping  both 
engine  and  the  people,  and  the  whole  building  in  its 
vapor ;  making  a  great  display  of  itself,  but  doing 
nothing.  Sentiment  is  the  same  steam  quiet,  not  a 
particle  escaping,  drawing  a  ponderous  long  train  of 
cars.  The  sentimentality  that  we  despise,  that  we 
sneer  at,  that  we  laugh  at,  is  only  the  effervescence, 
the  useless  and  foolish  escape  of  that  which,  prisoned 
in  the  heart,  becomes  the  year-long  motive  power  of 
love,  of  self-denial,  of  sacrifice,  of  patient  endeavor,  of 
noble  consecration.  There  are  men  and  women  who 
seem  to  live  without  love,  who  go  through  life  alone, 
but  it  is  only  seeming.  They  do  not  tell  the  secrets 
of  the  years  that  are  gone,  the  little  romance  of  the 
past,  that  finds  its  only  expression  perhaps,  in  a  with- 
ered flower  between  the  leaves  of  a  book,  or  in  a  lock 
of  hair.  And  many  and  many  a  time  these  men  or 
these  women,  old  bachelor  and  old  maid,  if  you  choose 
to  give  them  those  names,  have  no  human  love  that 
is  apparent  to-day,  for  the  reason  that  the  shining  of 
that  old  memory  is  so  much  brighter  to  them  than 
any  living  human  form  or  features,  that  it  casts  them 
all  into  eclipse  ;  and  they  are  secretly  true  to  the 
image  of  beauty  and  glory  that  they  carry  in  their 
inmost  hearts.  And  the  tongue  that  can  speak  a 
flippant  or  unkind  word  of  such  as  these  ought  to  be 
withered  at  its  root. 


LOVE.  i^g 


High-  Water  Mark  of  the  World. 

What  is  it  that  represents  the  high  tide  of  civiliza- 
tion ?  What  is  it  that  represents  the  utmost  achieve- 
ment of  the  world  to-day  ?  Did  you  ever  ask  your- 
selves the  question  ?  It  is  not  standing  armies  and 
arsenals  ;  it  is  not  capitol  buildings,  parliament  houses, 
palaces,  and  city  halls  ;  it  is  not  our  magnificent  mod- 
ern dwellings  ;  it  is  not  our  courts  of  law  and  justice  ; 
it  is  not  our  school-houses  ;  it  is  not  our  docks,  our 
shipping  and  our  commerce  that  circles  the  globe. 
If  there  should  come  to  this  planet  some  dweller  of 
a  heavenly  orb,  with  a  definite  understanding  of  the 
condition  and  history  of  human  life,  wishing  to  find 
out  what  is  the  finest  and  noblest  thing  that  the  earth 
has  produced,  he  would  look  for  none  of  these  things. 
He  would  look  to  find  the  quality  of  our  human  homes. 
The  mother  and  her  child  worshipped  in  ancient  Egypt 
three  thousand  years  before  Moses,  just  as  she  is  wor- 
shipped in  Catholicism  to-day  :  the  mother  and  her 
child,  the  mother  true,  and  pure,  and  sweet,  and  lov- 
ing, and  cultivated,  and  educated,  is  the  highest,  finest 
outcome  of  the  world ;  and  with  the  child  in  her  arms, 
they  represent  the  highest  results  of  the  world's  civ- 
ilization ;  and  everything  else  on  the  face  of  the  earth 
simply  stands  for  and  serves  that.  For  the  sake  of 
the  mother  and  her  child,  armies  are  organized  and 


I50  LIFE  QUESTIONS. 

battles  are  fought ;  for  the  sake  of  the  mother  and 
her  child,  ships  are  trading  around  the  world  ;  for  the 
sake  of  the  mother  and  her  child,  courts  of  justice 
are  organized  and  police  parade  and  guard  the  safety 
and  peace  of  our  cities ;  for  the  sake  of  the  mother 
and  her  child,  school-houses,  colleges  and  universities 
are  erected  ;  for  the  sake  of  the  mother  and  her  child 
are  stores,  banks  and  offices  built ;  for  the  sake  of  the 
mother  and  her  child,  men  dig  deep  for  treasures  in 
the  bowels  of  the  earth.  There  is  no  activity  on 
earth  that  does  not  exist  for  them,  and  that  does 
not  from  afar,  from  the  heavens  above  or  the  depths 
of  the  earth  beneath,  seek  all  its  treasures,  simply 
that  it  may  lay  them  at  her  feet,  simply  that  they 
may  minister  to  her  adornment,  to  her  culture,  to  her 
happiness,  to  her  beauty,  to  her  peace,  and  to  the  train- 
ing of  the  little  child.  This  is  the  end  of  all  living. 
The  century  plant,  you  know,  grows  for  a  hundred 
years,  gathering  sustenance  from  the  earth,  from  the 
rain,  from  the  air,  from  the  sunlight,  one  hundred 
years  of  endeavor,  one  hundred  years  of  accumula- 
tion, only,  that  at  the  last,  it  may  blossom  out  into 
one  perfect  flower.  This  universe  of  ours,  from  the 
fire-mists  of  millions  of  years  agone,  has  existed  only 
that  at  the  last,  not  the  century  plant,  but  the  millen- 
nium plant  may  blossom  at  last  into  the  perfect  flower 
of  a  perfect  mother  and  a  perfect  child,  the  highest 
object  and  expression  of  human  life.     For  this  and 


LOVE.  151 

this  alone,  do  all  things  exist,  and  towards  this  do  all 
things  tend. 

Love  and  Patriotism. 

And  what  is  patriotism  ?  To  leave  this  central 
idea  of  the  outcome  and  centre  of  society,  and  come 
out  towards  the  world  of  affairs,  what  is  patriotism, 
and  what  does  it  mean  ?  You  remember  those  fa- 
miliar words  of  Scott : 

Breathes  there  a  man  with  soul  so  dead, 
Who  never  to  himself  hath  said, 
This  is  my  own,  my  native  land  1 
Whose  heart  within  him  hath  not  burned, 
As  home  his  footsteps  he  hath  turned. 
From  wandering  on  a  foreign  strand  ? 

And  you  remember  those  other  familiar  words  — 
but  perhaps,  you  have  never  noticed  what  it  is  that  is 
central  in  them  —  those  words  that  so  fire  the  human 
heart : 

Strike  !  till  the  last  armed  foe  expires  ; 
Strike  !  for  your  altars  and  your  fires; 
Strike  1  for  the  green  graves  of  your  sires ; 
God,  and  your  native  land  ! 

In  all  these  the  central  thought  is  simply  love. 
Altars,  fires,  graves,  merely  outward  symbols  and 
manifestations  of  this  central,  all  absorbing  passion 
of  humanity.  Patriotism  simply  means  the  senti- 
ment of  love,  nothing  else.  Take  the  soldiers  that 
followed    through,  or  died    in    the  war.     We  some- 


1^2  LIFE    QUESTIONS. 

times  used  to  argue  that  this  country  was  predestined 
to  be  one.  The  Mississippi  river,  we  said,  ran 
through  it  from  north  to  south,  Hnking  it  together. 
By  virtue  of  the  very  configuration  of  its  valleys,  its 
mountain  chains,  and  its  river  bottoms,  it  was  des- 
tined, we  said,  to  be  one.  But  do  you  think  anybody 
ever  went  to  war,  during  those  four  years,  on  account 
of  a  calculation  like  that.-*  Do  you  think  anybody 
ever  went  to  war  because  this  country  was  the  great 
granary,  as  we  say,  of  the  world,  because  it  had  such 
extensive  forests,  because  it  had  such  mighty  rivers, 
such  boundless  plains,  and  such  things  as  we  speak  of 
in  our  Fourth  of  July  orations  .-•  Do  you  suppose 
anybody  ever  went  to  war  for  these  things  .•*  The 
one  thing  that  started  them,  and  sustained  them  all 
through,  was  simply  a  sentiment:  "This  is  my  coun- 
try, and  it  has  been  insulted  and  threatened."  Men 
calculated  about  it  no  more  than  they  would  calculate 
when  they  saw  their  mother  insulted,  as  to  whether 
they  should  spring  to  her  defence.  It  was  simply 
sentiment  that  led  those  banner-carriers  of  the  war 
to  take  the  key  point  of  the  battle,  plant  the  flag  in 
the  soil,  and  stand,  determined  that  it  should  either 
mark  the  place  that  they  had  won,  or  that  it  should 
be  wrapped  about  them  in  their  dying  hour.  Patri- 
otism is  only  a  sentiment. 


LOVE.  1^2 


Love  and  Morals. 


And  so  the  whole  wide  field  of  the  moral  life  of  the 
world  in  all  its  departments.  No  man  is  truly  moral 
who  acts  merely  from  a  sense  of  duty  or  prudence. 
It  has  been  well  said,  and  very  sharply,  that  though 
honesty  is  the  best  policy,  yet  no  man  is  honest  who 
is  honest  for  that  reason.  Morality  means  not  calcu- 
lation. No  man  is  perfectly  moral,  perfectly  saved  in 
his  own  being,  until  he  is  so  absorbed  in  love  of  that 
which  is  right,  until  the  beauty  of  truth  and  right 
have  captivated  his  soul,  so  that  he  would  follow 
them  wherever  they  might  lead.  Morality,  in  all  its 
wide  sweep,  then,  is  simply  a  sentiment  in  its  mighty 
power. 

Love  and  Religion. 

And  now  let  us  come  to  look  for  a  moment  at  that 
still  higher  department  of  life  which  we  call  religion. 
There  has  been  a  wide  controversy,  during  the  past 
two  or  three  years,  over  the  question  as  to  the  domain 
which  religion  has  a  right  to  occupy.  The  theo- 
logian, speaking  of  religion  as  being  the  soul  of 
society,  has  claimed  that  it  has  the  right  to  occupy 
every  intellectual  department  of  the  world.  Mr. 
Tyndall  has  made  himself  famous  in  some  directions, 
and  infamous  in  others,  because  he  has  said  that  the 
only  legitimate  realm  for  religion  to  occupy  is  the 


154  -^^-^"^  QUESTIONS. 

reatm  of  sentiment,  the  realm  of  feeling,  the  realm  of 
emotion.  But  is  not  Mr,  Tyndall  right,  when  we 
analyze  it  carefully  ?  Can  any  man  formulate  God  ? 
It  is  the  Bible,  itself,  that  asks:  "Canst  thou  by 
searching  find  out  God?"  If  you  cannot  find  Him 
out,  can  you  put  Him  into  language  ?  There  never 
has  been  a  creed,  expression,  or  outline  of  divinity, 
since  the  world  was  made,  that  has  not  belittled,  and 
dwarfed,  and  deformed  God.  And  the  vital  thought 
of  the  world  finds  itself  compelled  to  burst  all  these 
shackles,  and  think  of  God  as  the  spirit  of  life  at  the 
heart,  and  breathing  through  the  movement  of  all 
things.  Religion  is  first  and  essentially  that  which 
the  poets  express  when  they  talk  about  the  relation 
in  which  we  stand  to  the  sum  of  things  that  make  up 
the  universe.  Religion  is  itself  the  flow  and  ebb  of 
sentiment ;  the  kinship,  the  sympathy,  the  feeling  of 
mystery  with  which  men  look  upon  the  world  about 
them.  Byron  gives  this  essential  heart  and  idea  of 
religion  beautiful  expression,  in  some  of  his  verses 
of  Childe  Harold ;  as  when  he  says  : 

Are  not  the  mountains,  waves  and  skies  a  part 
Of  me  and  of  my  soul,  as  I  of  them  ? 
Is  not  the  love  of  these  deep  in  my  heart 
With  a  pure  passion  ? 

And  again, 

I  live  not  in  myself,  but  I  become 
Portion  of  that  around  me  ;  and  to  me 
High  mountains  are  a  feeling. 


LOVE. 


155 


And  Wordsworth,  in  that  beautiful  passage  where 
he  speaks  of  — 

A  sense  of  something  far  more  deeply  interfused, 

Whose  dwelling  is  the  light  of  setting  suns. 

And  the  round  ocean,  and  the  living  air. 

And  the  blue  skies,  and  in  the  heart  of  man : 

A  motion  and  a  spirit  that  impels 

All  living  things,  all  objects  of  all  thought, 

And  rolls  through  all  things. 

Here  is  religion  for  the  heart,  then  ;  it  is  a  senti- 
ment that  sees  the  face  of  God  looking  out  of  the 
sky  ;  that  sees  the  order  of  God  in  the  movement  of 
the  stars ;  that  sees  the  beauty  of  God  in  flowers  ; 
that  sees  the  love,  the  infinite  life  of  God  bursting  up 
in  the  little  tiny  grass-blades  over  all  the  earth ;  that 
looks  beneath  this  superficial  form  of  things.  The 
man  who  has  no  sentiment,  no  religious  feeling  in 
him,  is  the  one  that  Wordsworth  speaks  of  when  he 
says  : 

A  primrose  by  the  river's  brim, 
A  simple  primrose  is  to  him. 
And  it  is  nothing  more. 

But  to  one  who  can  feel  and  think,  it  is  like  that 
other  idea  that  Tennyson  gives  such  fine  expression 
to,  when  he  holds  that  little  flower,  plucked  from  a 
cranny  of  the  wall,  and  says  :  If  he  could  compre- 
hend that  he  should  know  both  God  and  man. 

Love  and  Law. 
This  is  the  very  substance,  the  central  idea  of  the 


156  LIFE    QUESTIONS. 

divine  life.  We  do  not  think  of  the  law  of  the  relig- 
ious life  when  love  is  perfect,  any  more  than  we 
think  of  the  law  when  we  look  at  the  stars.  We  do 
not  learn  the  laws  of  the  heavenly  bodies  because  we 
find  out  the  something  of  power  or  force  that  compels, 
that  controls,  that  makes  the  stars  hang  where  they 
do,  or  swing  in  the  orbits  which  they  follow.  We 
deduce  our  laws  from  the  perfect  expression  of  the 
order  and  life  of  the  universe.  And  so  if  men  loved 
completely  we  should  forget  all  about  law.  There  is 
not  an  evil  on  the  face  of  the  earth  that  would  not  be 
obliterated,  blotted  out  at  once,  if  only  men  intelli- 
gently, perfectly,  completely  loved.  You  would  for- 
get that  there  ever  was  a  law  made.  There  would 
be  no  need  of  Congress,  of  laws,  of  armies,  of  battles. 
Men  would  be  led  in  the  beauty  of  the  true  life  by 
the  power  of  a  living  attraction. 

Love  and  Retrospect. 

What,  then,  is  the  sum  and  substance  of  it  all  ? 
Take  our  own  individual  life.  As  we  look  back 
toward  childhood  —  childhood  means  to  us  the  love 
of  our  mother,  father,  sister,  brother,  playmate,  com- 
panion, friend.     When  we  say  with  Hood, 

I  remember,  I  remember, 
The  house  where  I  was  born  — 

The  house  takes  on  its  meaning  as  hallowed  with 


LOVE: 


157 


the  beauty  that  rayed  out  of  a  loving  mother's  face. 
And  when  we  grow  to  be  young  men,  we  look  for- 
ward to  life  with  the  inspiration  of  love,  the  one 
grand  thing  being  that  we  should  search  over  all  the 
world,  if  we  can,  to  find  the  other  self  which  shall  be 
the  completion  of  happiness  to  our  being.  And 
when  we  get  to  be  gray-haired  and  grave  men,  in 
middle  age  or  verging  toward  old  age,  we  may  not 
talk  so  much  about  love  as  we  once  did,  but  it  is 
nothing  but  loves  that  remain,  that  make  green,  and 
bright,  and  beautiful  the  old  age  ;  or  it  is  the  cher- 
ished memories  of  loves  that  are  past,  for  which  we 
would  not  take  all  the  whole  world  could  give  if  they 
must  be  sacrificed.  And  when  at  last  the  end  comes, 
and  we  think  of  the  death-bed,  what  is  it  we  care  for 
then  .■•  Do  I  not  speak  &ut  the  heart  of  you  all  when 
I  say  that  the  only  thing  I  care  for,  as  I  look  forward 
to  that  time,  is  that  my  pathway  may  still  be  encom- 
passed with  love ;  that  when  I  can  no  more  give 
utterance  to  my  thoughts  or  feelings  by  speech,  I 
may  still  feel  the  love  of  some  one  pressing  my 
hand  ;  that  the  last  look  of  earth  may  be  into  the 
eyes  of  some  one  who  loves  me ! 

Love  and  Prospect. 

And  beyond,  over  there !     They  talk  a  good  deal, 
sometimes,  about  an  impersonal  immortality.     They 


158  LIFE  QUESTIONS. 

question  whether  we  shall  remember  or  know  the 
friends  that  we  have  loved  here.  But  I  for  one,  am 
ready  to  say  that  I  care  for  no  impersonal  immortal- 
ity ;  it  is  words  that  mean  nothing  to  me ;  and  I  do 
not  care  for  any  heaven  that  does  not  mean  a  personal, 
tender,  old-time  love  for  those  that  have  become  a 
part  and  the  very  best  part  of  my  whole  being.  I  do 
not  care  for  heaven  if  it  is  to  be  purchased  at  the 
price  of  all  those  that  have  stood  nearest  to  me  on 
earth.  I  would  not  take  it  as  a  gift ;  it  is  only  an 
empty  husk  with  the  kernel  dropped  out.  If  this 
personal  love  is  to  be  missed,  I  had  rather  that  the 
place  where  my  body  is  buried  should  be  visited  by 
some  one  that  loves  me  as  long  as  love  and  memory 
remain,  weeping  now  and  then,  a  tear  of  regret, 
placing  a  flower  upon  my  tomb,  and  then  be  forgot- 
ten when  love  and  personal  love  is  dead.  But  I 
believe  something  higher  and  better  than  that.  I 
believe  in  a  future  life,  and  that  love  is  the  heart  and 
beginning  of  it  there  as  it  is  here.  We  shall  not  be 
ourselves  if  this  is  taken  away.  Love  is  able  to  make 
beautiful  the  desert,  or  a  lonely  world  in  another  life ; 
but  the  absence  of  it  would  blacken  and  darken  with 
rust  all  the  gold,  make  worthless  all  the  precious 
stones,  make  lonely  all  the  streets,  blot  out  the  very 
centre  and  meaning  of  heaven  itself.  One  of  the 
prettiest  pictures  in  our  modern  literature  is  in  a  poem 
by  Mr.  Rosetti,  where  he  represents  a  young  wife 


LOVE. 


159 


who  died  on  her  marriage  day,  waiting  for  twenty 
long  years  in  heaven  ;  watching  every  flight  of  spirits 
as  they  come  from  the  earth  to  see  if  he  is  among 
them.  And  as  year  after  year  goes  by,  disappoint- 
ment follows  disappointment,  and  she  waits  and  waits, 
and  he  does  not  come ;  at  last  she  turns  away  in  the 
glory  and  the  beauty  and  weeps  those  old  human 
earthly  tears.  We  shall  be  the  same,  if  there  be  a 
future,  as  we  are  now ;  and  love  must  abide  or  there 
will  be  no  heaven. 


THE    END. 


This  book  is  DUE  on  the  last  date  stamped  below 


MAY  1 1  1932 
JAN  2  9  ^93* 

AUG  3      1960 


.^i.      Form  L-9-35m-8,'28 


■y^=s=— .:^*S= 


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